In a sense, Berlin stands for any place in the modern world, for each vulnerable city.
Despite a threatening future, it is a symbol of freedom, even in art.
Kynaston McShine, BERLINART–Eine Einführung

How did you come to make art?
After I had worked as a blacksmith for several years, I wanted to go further. I wanted to deal with incarnation and began to study art and philosophy.
In particular, I like watching an idea become reality and the questions that emerge while I’m making art. It always starts with a fairly popular idea, then meditative moments rise into the act of implementation and I loose track of time. Thoughts, feelings and questions emerge from the subconscious. I particularly like sculptures that look very old, as if I had not made them, but found them. I just try to bring them out from a kind of primordial soup.

Which artists have inspired you the most throughout your career?
Martin Kippenberger – already since 1996, the best contemporary painter. His irony is rough and fine at the same time. Giuseppe Penone, Arte Povera. Gislebertus von Autun, sacral sculpture of the 12th Century, Joseph Beuys, Christoph Schlingensief, Gottfried Benn, Walter Benjamin, Klaus Teweleit "male fantasies"- every man should receive it on prescription, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - made a painting from the Genesis about Adam and Eve before the tree of knowledge, and behind the branches, a forester stands with his German shepherd. Giovanni Battista Piranesi draws a morbid cross into the infinite darkness of architecture in the 18th century - this is science fiction. Lucas Cranach, “Fountain of Youth” - but his human beings are actually getting younger. Hieronymus Bosch.

What in your opinion are the main duties of an artist?
The main task of the artist is to make art, and that's the most challenging. History shows that visionary art often does not get recognized before the artist’s death. This is particularly true for the artists whose work makes a strong counterpoint to social norms and political or religious conditions. There are still very few who dare to really do something that puts vision before success.

What in your opinion are the main duties of a curator?
The good curator should not just invite their friends and acquaintances to do exhibitions. In respect to the realization of his brilliant idea, he looks for very different artistic positions that illuminate his idea. He proceeds his way through the work of the artists carefully and patiently, and should not curate too many group shows!

If you could pick any space (inside or outside or both) in the world – where would you like to show?
In my bathroom.

Which one is your favorite unrealized project?
A collaboration with Simon Rühle. We do the Genesis in seven days, until we are completely exhausted. And then we’re going to celebrate.

Why did you never realize it?
We will, I promise!

What were your thoughts when selecting your works for 5c5c?
Towel Origami is the reconciliation with a sculpture. It decorated many hotel rooms and surprises us especially if we do not expect art. We fly around in airplanes, within a very short period of time we pass so many things that happen on earth. This does not affect us. Then we come to the hotel room and find a towel origami and are touched.

How did you come to create your Origami towels?
I came to my hotel room looked at the bed and was dazzled by so much beauty.

How did you come to make art?
Spontaneously, I might say I simply never did anything else other than making art. But now that I think about it more carefully, I think that is not quite the truth. Where I grew up there was no real interest in art and even less in contemporary art. Having grown up in a working-class environment, I had more or less to find my way on my own. But what I got was a strong sense of what a society is and could be. Growing up in Denmark in the 1970s and 80s there was a strong sense that anything you want to do is just fine. My parents always told me to do what I considered the most interesting and joyful. Not only was happiness seen as the main goal (regardless of the way of how this was going to be achieved), the social system guaranteed free education with access to school and university for everyone and also supported the freedom of choice. My friends and I made use of this freedom and chose to do nothing at all to start with.
Years later when I was a student at the art academy I lived with fellow art students in a huge complex of social housing.  One afternoon we had a a kid from the neighborhood visiting. When we asked him what he wanted to become one day, he replied: "When I grow up, I want to do the same as you, sit on the balcony all day long doing nothing."

Which artists have inspired you the most throughout your career?
I don't have idols in that sense, but of course there are artists and even more singular works by several artists that have inspired me. An example would be the way Robert Smithson dealt with material. I was also always interested in the theories of the situationists and their different approach to urban environments. But I get inspired by the world outside of the art as well. The Danish football player Mikael Laudrup for example is inspiring- best Danish player ever.

What in your opinion are the main duties of an artist?
To raise questions.

What in your opinion are the main duties of a curator?
I guess to raise even more questions. I consider the collaboration of an artist and a curator to be a way to approach the questions raised by both and a way of trying to find one or more possible answers.

If you could pick any space (inside or outside or both) in the world – where would you like to show?
More outside I guess. But that is what I am doing anyway. I love doing public interventions. I like to look at the city of Berlin as my playground and very much hope that I will be able to continue playing here forever. An indoor playground could be the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, I have been to so many Bauhaus complexes over the last couple of years. I bought all the books and I created several works based on my study of the Bauhaus era. In a way, I built up my own archive and would be interested in enlarging it even more.

Which one is your favorite unrealized project?
Years back I made a proposal for a tower from which you could watch the `black sun.´ A phenomenon that occurs every year, not far from where I grew up when the birds that emigrate to the south for the winter meet up in the flat wetlands along the coast of south Jutland and eat bugs. My idea was to construct a bird watching tower in the middle of a traffic roundabout. A nice wooden one. To get the people to the traffic island I would have had to dig a tunnel.

Why did you never realize it?
I never started digging. And I wanted to work on a tower not on a tunnel.

What were your thoughts when selecting your works for 5c5c?
I wanted to show works that would interact with the other works in the show. The birdhouses are made of mirror and therefore reproduce not only images of the works on display but also of the people looking at them. When in front of my work people can see themselves; in a way, the house hosts the images of both the art and the people viewing it. While producing an extra image of its surroundings, the birdhouse's body is in a way camouflaged and therefore almost invisible.

How did you come to create your birdhouses?
The first birdhouse "look at the bird" was hung in a tree on a traffic island roundabout in Berlin. The intervention was very discreet, it was very hard to find and blended in very well. For me, interventions are gestures. With the birdhouse, it was a gesture for the birds, nicely disguised in in an otherwise hectic roundabout.

How did you come to make art?
Well I guess I am not one of those people who always wanted to become an artist and drew from when they were 5 years old. I started getting interested in art when I was 16. I had a very good art teacher at high school inspired me to become passionate for art. The Italian Renaissance seemed most fascinating to me. I started to take art as a main subject in school and began to draw every day. Very classical. Natural studies mostly.
After graduating from high school, I studied graphic design but realized that I was not at all interested in pursuing a career in the field of advertisement. A gallery owner and art professor pushed me to apply to the art academy, and I ended up studying painting and sculpture. I never really liked it there. The other students were not really interested in a productive dialogue and it was a very competitive atmosphere. After one year with the same professor, everyone knows exactly what he’s is going to say before he opens his mouth. But, I learned what I don't want and I guess that is something useful as well.

Which artists have inspired you the most throughout your career?
Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti have been the most influential artists in my early stages as an artist. I liked their unique way of pursuing their own thing while everyone else was doing abstract works. I admire them for their understanding of the vulnerability of the human creature, which they both understood in their very own way. Later I was drawn to the arte povera artists like Kounellis, Paolini, Fabro Penone. I liked their unorthodox approach to materials. There was a certain poetry they were able to discover in very simple things and materials that I enjoyed. To this day I think that the Kounellis installation showing living horses in a gallery space is an amazing work.

What in your opinion are the main duties of an artist?
I can't really say ‘every artist should do this,’ but personally I think that an artist has a social responsibility and that his or her work should somehow reflect on socially relevant subjects or at least add something positive to this society. That should be done in an artistic way. I think Joseph Beuys was a perfect example. His works always dealt with socially relevant questions, but he never forgot that he was a sculptor.
As an artist, one has to create obstacles or problems for him or herself to overcome. On one hand, there is always the subject and on the other hand, there is the formal challenge in every artistic discipline. What do I want as a sculptor, painter and so on? An artist has to create some goal he wants to achieve. A good idea means nothing if one can't find the adequate formal expression for it and plain formalism is boring as well. Good works always consist of a rich concept translated into an artistic language.

What in your opinion are the main duties of a curator?
A curator should be able to create an interesting dialogue between different artworks, function as a communicator between the artworks and the audience, support the artists by choosing the right works and place them in the best possible way. The same work can have a very different  feeling depending upon the works it is showed with or the location it is placed in. A curator has to have a really good understanding of the works he or she is dealing with. Sometimes they have a more objective eye than the artists who created the works and are not able to take some distance to their own work. Artists can be complicated personalities, and in a group show a curator has to deal with those problems as well, so he or she should definitely have some social skills as well. Very often I see curators abusing artworks to illustrate mediocre concepts of their own - thinking that it is all about his or her Gesamtkunstwerk. That is the worst terrible case.

If you could pick any space in the world, where would you like to show?
One of my favorite indoor spaces is the museum of art in Toyota City in Japan. I love the particular architecture of Taniguchi and it would be a pleasure to show over there.

Which one is your favorite unrealized project?
It is called the "fan" project. It contains several huge sculptures, which basically deal with the expansion or spreading system of a fan. They are related to former subjects of my work - using a single unit in a repetitive manner to create a very complex shape. They are supposed to be pretty big in scale.

Why did you never realize it?
For the very simple reason that it is not within my budget and needs to be done with the help of a company since I can not handle a sculpture of this size in my own studio. So I will have to wait for the day to come. Right now I just make models which show pretty well what those sculptures will look like.

What were your thoughts when selecting your works for 5c5c?
Selecting works for this show was determined by simple facts, it always starts and ends with the budget. I tried to think about what kind of sculpture or installation I could show that would fit in a suitcase but still be a respectable installation in terms of quality and size.

How did you come to create your figures?
Those figures belong to a series of works that deal with different religions and their reception or approach in different cultures. The figures are made with a special fabric that is the original fabric for the traditional clothes of monks from Thailand. The faces I used are solely Asian faces. The idea of this work is to create attraction and distance at the same time. The colorful fabric attracts and the completely dark faces don't allow to get connected. In the Western world, there is a certain fascination and romantic desire for Asian religions. Mostly it stays on a very superficial level - a certain attraction to the exotic without a real understanding of its true nature.