happy_birthday | orthunga

Happy Birthday

Steffen Jørgensen

22. November, 2025 - 03. januar, 2026

Foto: Malle Madsen

(english below)

Salt stings and saves. It keeps meat alive long after it’s dead. Too much and you die, too little and you die. It’s balance, or maybe it’s just punishment that tastes good.

Sugar always promises comfort, but it’s a slow violence—soft, sticky, persistent. It clings. It never lets go. Even flies can’t resist it. Especially flies.

Sugar is hygroscopic; it drinks the room. It drinks your breath and your sweat. It drinks your presence and your absence. Over days it gets soft, then liquid, then doctrinally sticky, and drips off the paper into stalagmites of brown caramel.

The flies are already here. The honest ones. They sit on the sugar rim of the pot, black beads of judgment, buzzing like a chorus of teeth. Flies never lie. They love sugar and shit equally. They arrive only when something is about to return to the earth.*

Steffen Jørgensen (f. 1983, DK) konstruerer verdener, hvor samfundet langsomt imploderer, dyr indtager hovedrollerne, og eksistentiel uro bliver en mærkeligt charmerende tidsfordriv. Med animation, postapokalyptisk antropologi og køkkenvask-filosofi som sine redskaber dissekerer han de myter, vi lever efter—og lader dem køre i ring som et tog uden destination, med en udmattet giraf slæbende efter sig.

I soloværker som Civilizasia skaber Jørgensen fabler, der har mistet deres moralske kompas: Dyr rejser endeløst gennem ødelagte landskaber, animerede legetøjsfigurer fejlciterer Nietzsche, og world-building forvandles til en form for eksistentiel slapstick—tragisk, humoristisk og ubehageligt genkendelig.

Hans mangeårige samarbejde med Will Benedict, særligt serien The Restaurant, iscenesætter møder, hvor mennesker og ikke-mennesker laver mad, skændes, søger efter mening eller fejler spektakulært i at fungere. Fra blå humanoide kyllinger til kok-detektiver, der forhører gæster om “hanger”, afsløres produktivitet som en kosmisk joke og fødekæden som et bureaukratisk mareridt.

Jørgensen har studeret på Det Fynske Kunstakademi og Akademie der Bildenden Künste i Wien. Hans værker er blevet vist på Art Sonje Center (Seoul), Den Frie (København), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneve) og UCCA (Beijing).

Han er medstifter af kunstnerkollektivet Years, bor og arbejder på Møn og er repræsenteret af Bianca D’Alessandro Gallery.

*Uddrag af tekst af Steffen Jørgensen

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Happy Birthday

Steffen Jørgensen

November 22, 2025 - January 03, 2026

Photo: Malle Madsen

Salt stings and saves. It keeps meat alive long after it’s dead. Too much and you die, too little and you die. It’s balance, or maybe it’s just punishment that tastes good.

Sugar always promises comfort, but it’s a slow violence—soft, sticky, persistent. It clings. It never lets go. Even flies can’t resist it. Especially flies.

Steffen Jørgensen (b. 1983, DK) constructs worlds where society slowly implodes, animals take the leading roles, and existential unease becomes a strangely charming pastime. Using animation, post-apocalyptic anthropology, and kitchen-sink philosophy as his tools, he dissects the myths we live by—letting them spin in circles like a train with no destination, with a weary giraffe dragging behind it.

In solo works such as Civilizasia, Jørgensen creates fables that have lost their moral compass: animals travel endlessly through ruined landscapes, animated toy creatures misquote Nietzsche, and world-building turns into a form of existential slapstick—tragic, humorous, and uncomfortably familiar.

His long-standing collaboration with Will Benedict, particularly the series The Restaurant, stages encounters in which humans and non-humans cook, argue, search for meaning, or fail spectacularly at functioning. From blue humanoid chickens to chef-detectives interrogating diners about “hanger,” productivity is revealed as a cosmic joke and the food chain as a bureaucratic nightmare.

Jørgensen studied at the Funen Art Academy and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. His work has been shown at Art Sonje Center (Seoul), Den Frie (Copenhagen), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), and UCCA (Beijing).

He is a cofounder of the artists’ collective Years, lives and works on the island of Møn, and is represented by Bianca D’Alessandro Gallery.

* Excerpt from text by Steffen Jørgensen