In his film work, Jesper Just links images of an exceptional quality to sound and music. The enigma disrupts the narrative, creating a tension that lets the poetry of the space emerge.

In the lower gallery at the Palais de Tokyo, Jesper Just creates an audiovisual installation and a vast spatial intervention which transform the existing space and the visitor’s journey. The videos, at once independent and interconnected, explore the idea that the metropolis is an entity with a body. The films follow two characters: a young girl and a disabled child, played respectively by Dree Hemingway and Rylee Sweeney. The young girl does not appear as an individual but instead embodies the ideals of youth and femininity conveyed by contemporary society. They are linked through the presence and manipulation of sound.

The music serves as an omnipresent, perpetually moving force behind the installation, guiding the characters and their spectators as they progress through the exhibition. The film’s setting, the equally iconic and controversial One World Trade Center, becomes, as in much of Just’s work, a character itself, serving here as a phantom limb, indicative of absence and loss, but likewise a testament to resilience. Its presence, somehow inorganic, appears as a prosthetic limb within an altered skyline. Within the videos the characters mirror, oppose and interact, exploring themes of ableism and agency as well as the boundaries of body and selfhood.

Curator: Katell Jaffrès

Jesper Just (born 1974, lives in New York) is an internationally-renowned artist. He graduated in 2003 from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and represented Denmark in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. He has a number of solo exhibitions to his name, in Europe and the States, including “Jesper Just – Appearing / Intercourses”, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (29.05.2014 – 19.10.2014). The MAC/VAL contemporary art museum (Vitry-sur-Seine) hosted the artist’s first monographic exhibition in France in 2011. His work can also be seen at the Galerie Perrotin (Paris), James Cohan Gallery (New York) and Galleri Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen).

A monographic book published by Palais de Tokyo is accompanying this show.