Contemporary Art Feature — Between Matter, Mortality and Moral Disquiet

In an era increasingly defined by immateriality—by screens, algorithms and the dematerialisation of experience—few artists insist, so unapologetically, on the stubborn physicality of existence as Morten Viskum. His practice, long situated at the fault-line between fascination and discomfort, returns repeatedly to the same unresolved question: what does it mean to look at life once it has ceased to behave as life?

At the current exhibitions, where contemporary art is often curated into polite conceptuality, Viskum’s presence reads almost as an interruption. His work refuses distance. It insists on proximity—ethical, emotional, and at times existential. It is precisely this refusal that has placed him in dialogue, however uneasily, with the legacy of the Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marcus Harvey—artists similarly invested in the material limits of life, death, and representation.

 

MORTEN VISKUM

 

 

Yet Viskum’s trajectory is distinct. Trained initially in veterinary science before fully committing to art, his sensibility emerges from a rare convergence of anatomical knowledge and conceptual intent. Where others might invoke mortality as metaphor, he approaches it as fact—unembellished, unresolved, and insistently present.

“I was always more interested in the process than the result,” he reflects. “Building, destroying, rebuilding again. The making mattered more than the conclusion.”

This early fascination with process—structures assembled and dismantled in childhood—has matured into a practice concerned less with provocation for its own sake than with the instability of perception itself. Nature, anatomy, and memory converge in works that refuse easy categorisation. The result is an oeuvre that sits uncomfortably within the traditional moral grammar of contemporary art.

 

Critic Arthur Sopin observes:

“His work compels us to confront not only what we see, but what we are willing to tolerate in the act of seeing. It is less provocation than interrogation.”

The ethical dimension of Viskum’s practice cannot be separated from its material one. His use of organic matter—once-living forms now recontextualised within the gallery space—forces a confrontation with cultural discomfort around death, bodily integrity, and representation. It is not spectacle in the conventional sense; rather, it is a sustained refusal to aestheticise away discomfort.

Viskum himself resists sensational framing:

“It is not about shock. It is about reality. And reality is not always comfortable.”

 

 

 

His conceptual vocabulary extends beyond material choices into a broader critique of authorship and identity. In his long-running Self-Portraits series, the artist stages himself through multiple constructed identities—at times historical, at times symbolic—questioning the stability of the self within contemporary visual culture. In one iteration, he appears as a scientist; in another, a figure absorbed by financial collapse; elsewhere, a distorted echo of public notoriety. These are not transformations so much as dissections of persona.

Within the context of the Biennale—where identity is often curated into legibility—such fragmentation feels deliberately resistant.

The artist’s reflections on technology and contemporary life further situate his work within urgent present-day discourse. While acknowledging the expansion of creative possibility, he remains wary of substitution: of mediated experience replacing direct encounter.

“Technology brings us closer, but also further away. Sometimes the most radical act is to turn it off.”

Photographer Andreas Rod, who has documented Viskum’s exhibitions, situates this tension within a broader cultural condition:

“His work feels increasingly relevant in a world that is losing contact with material consequence. It returns us to something unfiltered.”

 

There is, too, a quieter conceptual thread running through his practice: remembrance. His ongoing photographic work at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris—documenting grave portraits—extends his inquiry beyond the gallery into spaces of public mourning and historical continuity. It is, in its own way, an archive of disappearance.

Despite frequent attempts to categorise him—neo-Dadaist, maximalist, provocateur—Viskum remains resistant to taxonomy.

“Labels are not my concern. Meaning belongs to the viewer.”

 

 

ABSOLUT  VISKUM III

RETROSPEKTIV 1993-2016, 7-17 APRIL 2016

 

© interview by Arthur Sopin and photography by Andreas Rod