Sharp and Subversive: Superflex Exhibition Impresses at Arken Museum

The Danish artist collective Superflex is currently featured in a large and comprehensive retrospective exhibition at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art, located just outside Copenhagen. Critic Dan Jönsson expresses admiration for the exhibition, describing it as sharp, subversive, consistent, and inventive.

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The first time I saw a work by Superflex, sometime thirty years ago, I honestly understood nothing.

Jönsson recalls his first encounter with Superflex's work about thirty years ago, admitting he didn't understand it at the time. The early work involved an orange aquarium with stylized fish, initially appearing like a concept for an advertising agency. Superflex emerged in the 1990s, a period characterized by postmodern art's ironic engagement with commercial aesthetics. They began with seemingly empty design tools, a logo and a signal color, focusing on surface appeal, a common strategy in the attention economy.

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However, this initial focus on aesthetics soon evolved into a deliberate systemic intervention. Formed by Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen during their studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Superflex began integrating an activist, alternative political agenda around the turn of the millennium. Their distinctive orange logo started appearing in small-scale biogas projects in rural East Africa and local TV stations in marginalized European suburbs.

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The Danish artist trio Superflex is currently featured at the Arken museum for contemporary art outside Copenhagen.

The exhibition at Arken showcases the exponential growth of their project, spanning political poster campaigns, subversive economic experiments, and complex research initiatives. A central piece is "The Ark," a large-scale plan for an artificial underwater reef designed to protect endangered fish species. Although still largely conceptual, this project transforms the exhibition's core into an experimental factory environment, complete with modular prototypes, changing rooms, and an "interdisciplinary architecture manifesto." This artificial wreck is presented as a response to humanity's climate debt and a gesture towards the species facing extinction.

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The project, cleverly called 'The Ark,' is still mostly on the drawing board but transforms the exhibition's center into an experimental factory environment.