Joakim Eskildsen: Home Works

Home works is the title of the internationally renowned artist Joakim Eskildsen’s years long and comprehensive project, which he began in 2005 and is still currently working on today. The exhibition Joakim Eskildsen: Home Works is the first major presentation of Home Works in Denmark and internationally.

Eskildsen works in the crossfield between art and documentary with a unique sense for light, color and composition, which often evokes a picturesque mood in his work, and which has made his artistic practice known internationally. He has often depicted people and their living conditions which he has come to know through longer stays and travels to Cuba, USA and a large number of countries in Europe. For seven years, Eskildsen and author Cia Rinne traveled around the world and portrayed the living conditions and culture of the Roma, which became the extensive work The Roma Journeys (2000-2006), that intimately and poetically depicts the largest minority in Europe.

After Eskildsen had children, he turned the camera lens towards his own life with the project Home Works where he has portrayed the family’s different homes, his children’s upbringing as well as the changing seasons and the passage of time. Home works touches on and explores in a sensory way, general and universal questions about home, the human existence and the beauty and transience of life. The exhibition will unfold Home Works chronologically through different chapters based on the family’s different homes and will touch upon themes and excerpts in the extensive work such as seasons and childhood. Through this, the exhibition will illuminate the character of the multifaceted project and the special temporality which is connected to the evolving of life and the human being as well as the cycle of nature.

About the artist
Joakim Eskildsen (born 1971) was trained by court photographer Rigmor Mydtskov and graduated from Aalto University in Helsinki. Eskildsen has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, i.a. in The Black Diamond, Royal Danish Library, in 2016 and most recently in 2022 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Lisbon and Abbaye de Jumièges, France. He has also carried out assignments for, among others, the New Yorker, The New York Times and Time Magazine.

The Exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Politiken-Fonden, Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond and Augustinus Fonden.

Image: Joakim Eskildsen, from the series Home Works, 2005 – (ongoing)

Events 
In connection with the exhibition a conversation between Joakim Eskildsen and Rune Gade will be held on June 2 from 4-5pm. The conversation will revolve around Eskildsen's practice and Home Works. Rune Gade has a master's degree and PhD in art history and is associate professor at the Department of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Gade's primary research areas include Danish and international contemporary art, the history and theory of photography and art criticism. Gade is currently working on a project about the radical (self-)biography as a genre within art history. The conversation takes place before the official opening of the exhibition on the same day June 2 from 5-7pm. Tickets for the conversation must be purchased in advance here (limited number of tickets available). On June 8 from 5-8pm you can participate in the writing workshop Home Writings with author Helene Johanne Christensen at Fotografisk Center. Home Writings is for everyone who wants to get better at writing and who wants to work experimentally and interdisciplinary with writing together with others. The workshop is based on the exhibition Home Works and Eskildsen's many photographs. Read more about the workshop and registration here.

Leporello publication
In connection with the exhibition Fotografisk Center publishes a leporello publication (Danish/English), designed by Joakim Eskildsen and printed by Narayana Press. The Leporello consists of 15 selected works from Home Works and is accompanied by the text "An artistic homecoming" by Signe Kahr Sørensen, director of Fotografisk Center, which unfolds Eskildsen's extensive project Home Works. The leporello is published in a limited edition and can be bought in Fotografisk Center's bookshop from June 2.