Kristoffer Ørum
Local. Copenhagen and Aarhus, mostly.
The machines are collaborators and cannot be credited.
An artist who makes things up about real places.
An archive with gaps in it, kept by the person who made the gaps.
Made by hand, mostly. Cut, cast, sanded, painted.
Not local. Boston, Vancouver, Riga, Kraków, Oberhausen, San Francisco.
A ghostly city that is no less real than the cities summoned forth in digital renderings by architects and planners to convince us of the future they are proposing. Brownfield Wonderland, 2022
Rather than proposing a return to older models, Watershed treats this uncertainty as an opportunity: a chance to experiment with new arrangements of familiar material, to test how different structures shape perception. Watershed, 2025
Together, the elements formed a series of overlapping linguistic and visual displacements. Putin's Nose, 2019
Some pieces he remembers to add, others he forgets.
Invigilators tell stories of events that could have transpired, whilst screens display the construction of monuments that never materialised. Monuments of A Fictitious Past, 2024
The project treats everyday objects and routines as sites of discovery and narrative potential, turning personal and mundane experience into shared, speculative material. Day to Day Data, 2008
The work functioned as both catalogue and speculative field guide, examining the invasive species through the lens of technological comparison. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
The installation asked speculative questions: Can you remember when Prime Minister Helle Thorning played a DJ set in Parliament instead of giving an opening speech? Frihed, Lighed Og Hip-Hop, 2023
Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Ørum focus on Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity and the metaphors and assumptions surrounding it. Disbelieving Gravity, 2013
The installation featured speculative scenarios about living arrangements including large oyster habitations. Ebeltoft After The Flood, 2021
When I use myself as material, my body and my image become a site for institutional self-critique—where paradoxically critique and complicity overlap. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
The work takes up how electronic systems constantly push at our understanding of who we are, our history and context, suggesting that their constant misunderstanding provides opportunities to see the world with fresh eyes. Feathered Misconceptions, 2018
The project used the signal crayfish as a figure for examining digital surveillance and mapping of human movement through wireless networks. Signal_Crayfish, 2020
During this struggle of imaginaries Spanien 19C continues to function as an art space, wedged in between building sites of what is to come and fragments of what used to be. Brownfield Wonderland, 2022
The opening included a performance component set in an alternative past, presenting counterfactual work that narrated fictional relationships between political movements and cultural expression. Mr. Spray, 2024
The installation drew connections between magic, architecture and eroticism through practices of showing and hiding. Sucker Trick, 2017
Standard interfaces are optimised for speed, reducing engagement to rapid recognition. Watershed, 2025
The project reflected on the transformation of the district: once a mixed working-class and industrial area, now rapidly becoming an upscale residential neighbourhood. City Planning, 2010
The artist-run space Spanien 19c used to be located in a messy and unregulated, but fairly central, part of the increasingly gentrified city of Aarhus. Brownfield Wonderland, 2022
The installation consisted of 3D-printed crayfish models, information screens, video material, and text displays on pink pedestals. Signal_Crayfish, 2020
The exhibition took as its subject the sources of inspiration behind artistic practice, inviting 35 Danish artists to contribute an object, material, or work that revealed part of their process. Auto Navigate My History, 2014
The festival invited artists to work across the boundaries between history, urban space, and perception, creating site-specific works and lectures that engaged with the city’s social and architectural context. A Subjective History of Gdańsk, 2011
This invisibility operates on several levels. Watershed, 2025
The work takes up how computer technology mediates our relationship to the physical world, creating hybrid zones where digital simulation and material reality intersect. Coffee Lake, 2019
The voices are those of the people who live in them. Affluence without abundance, 2025
I also do it because I, as a white, established, middle-aged male artist, embody many of the privileges and blind spots that shape both the world and the art world. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
An oversized plastic walnut that transmits wireless text. Wireless Walnut, 2018
A multidisciplinary team including architects, artists, designers, engineers, musicians and literary theorists collaborated with Bojen and Ørum to jointly create this immersive vision. Radiant Copenhagen, 2009
I participate in the system myself because it can grant me access to freedom and resources. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
The Perfect Wave (2004) is a 3D animated video work by Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Ørum that takes as its subject the iconic and endlessly recurring image of a single wave. The Perfect Wave, 2004
Tank Hip-Hop established the methodology of using counterfactual storytelling to construct alternative Danish histories. Tank Hip-Hop, 2022
Once generated, these daily phantom faces replaced Ørum’s personal avatar across his website, social networks and other platforms. Recognised Faces, 2014
As a user zooms in on a fragment, its pixel structure reveals itself, breaking the illusion of seamlessness. Watershed, 2025
Children and young people modified everyday objects such as chairs, umbrellas, tools, or clothing into hybrid sculptural forms. Mundane Heroics, 2019
The work asks how we can imagine a future after the welfare state, now that it seems to be definitively being dismantled. Melting State, 2020
By working with AI models trained on biased and incomplete datasets, DIFFUSED STATES engages with both their limitations and their possibilities. Diffused States (Vancouver), 2025
At Drottninggatan 6, the building itself becomes a collaborative canvas, shaped by decades of creative reuse. Even the City Dreams of Being Another, 2025
While you are reading this text, which has been designed to be unreadable by computers, everything that is said in this room is being recorded. Blind Listening, 2017
The work took the form of an artist's book featuring a 3D-printed signal crayfish sculpture on the cover. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
Each is hand-cut XPS foam, worked from a computer-generated sketch. Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care, 2026