Can you tell us more about this spring 2026 collaboration?
ASM: We’ve been collaborating in one way or another on almost all the shows. Esben, who has so many talents, created the soundscapes for all the Paris shows, for example. So for me, this just felt like the best way to return. For this show, Freja Wewer and William Becker from IssueIssue Magazine are doing the art direction—and before we even brought it up ourselves, they suggested it.
Esben Weile Kjær: We’ve worked on so many projects together that when we started talking about this, it came together really quickly.
Esben, the rats are a recurring theme in your work. Why is that?
EWK: I was a punk when I was younger and I remember many of my friends had rats as pets. They would keep them on their shoulders or in the deep pockets of the big old wool military jackets we wore in winter. Rats have always been a symbol of subculture and counterculture for me. I worked with hairless albino rats in 2020 for my exhibition “Power Play” at Gl Strand. One of the posters, shot by Philip Messmann, featured a performer sitting with a rat on their shoulder.
Last year, I created a series of fiberglass sculptures of 10 different rats, covered in glass crystals. They were all the same size as the largest rats found in Copenhagen’s King’s Garden. I wanted to make these Baroque-style rat sculptures. I’m not entirely sure why, but I felt an urgency to do it. I think they were first shown at the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, then in my exhibition “Solar System” at Kunsten. Right now, some of them are on view at Salzburger Kunstverein and Pace in Berlin—so they’ve already traveled quite a bit.
Anne Sofie and I have been friends for a long time. We think in very similar ways. We’re always talking about glam and trash. It’s very exciting to transform the sculptures into this pop city bag.
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