Pernille Albrethsen PA : Looking at your work from the outside, it seems as if a shift has taken place in the last couple of years β a shift away from works focusing on everyday situations and fundamental existential questions, to works, especially paintings, referring to specific situations or problems. Does this represent a deliberate choice to relate to a more concrete set of problems?
At present, my feeling is that if art fails to connect with something socially relevant, it has closed too tightly around itself. This change actually started before the soldier paintings. The year before I had been invited to participate in an exhibition on the Faroe Islands at a time when there was a debate as to whether homosexuals should have the same rights as everyone else, in itself incredibly provocative and due to the fact that there are some very religious people up there.
So I chose to do a painting of two men, two fishermen, kissing each other. I discovered that there was something I could do here, as an artist, that was different from what a politician can do. I could simply present a picture of what it looks like when men on the Faroe Islands kiss each other, something of which they apparently had no impression or picture whatsoever.
The same line of thought lay behind the soldier paintings, which came about after reports that Danish soldiers were involved in active combat in Afghanistan, and then suddenly there were four deaths in quick succession. They can be found on other international sites. American soldiers, for example, put such pictures out on Facebook. I considered it pretty useless that we were still debating whether we should be in Afghanistan or not, since our parliament had already unanimously decided that we should.
In this light, I viewed the ban on pictures almost as a provocation. The communication was a bit too one-way. So to me it seemed relevant to depict a Danish soldier with the Danish flag on his shoulder, dying in a desert environment β even if it was a fictive motif. This is also the basis of Women for Sale. PA: So how did your interest in trafficking and prostitution start? This I found a bit embarrassing. Inside this cultural elite was standing around, and right outside were three prostitutes.
