Project Details
Aarhus'er #1 is the most expansive chapter in Kristoffer Ørum's ongoing counterfactual project "Frihed, lighed og hip-hop" (Freedom, Equality and Hip-Hop), created in collaboration with rapper Emilio Hestepis. The exhibition transforms Kunsthal Aarhus into a layered installation that imagines an alternative version of Aarhus where grassroots movements and street cultures shaped not only the city's sound, but its collective memory and visual language.
The project encompasses three galleries featuring a 15-metre legal graffiti wall, a giant record player, DIY furniture, lo-fi mixtapes, deepfakes and look-alikes, speculative snapshots, and video fragments from another world. Strange audio players and distorted timelines hint at other ways things could have turned out, with hip-hop positioned not as a fixed genre or imported form, but as a set of evolving principles.
Central to the work is a fictional universe populated by figures such as Torkild Simonsen, Aarhus' first hip-hop mayor (1982-1997), and Marc Johnston, who relocated Denmark's capital from Copenhagen to Aarhus in 2019. The narrative includes workers at the Jaka factory performing political rap during work hours, the transformation of Aarhus Cathedral into a "temple of hip-hop," and the development of worker-scratch techniques that translate loom rhythms into DJ patterns.
The exhibition is structured across five interconnected spaces: "Det Kommunale" (The Municipal) presents official-looking information that gradually becomes strange; "Hip-hop Kolonihaven" (Hip-hop Allotment Garden) serves as a cave-like passage to another world; "Hip-hop Utopi" (Hip-hop Utopia) immerses visitors in graffiti-covered walls and alternative realities; "Nydelse & Lyd" (Pleasure & Sound) features folk dance meeting hip-hop around a giant record player; and an outdoor legal graffiti wall that changes throughout the exhibition's duration.
Rather than illustrating a lost history, the project manipulates familiar visual tropes and embraces the productive errors of AI. The exhibition blurs the line between documentary and fiction, making room for the unrealised potential of the past to resurface not as nostalgia, but as unfinished possibility. The city of Aarhus serves as both source and subject, remixed through the lens of local imagination and global street culture.
The work includes 78 fictional "documentary" photographs depicting scenarios such as people carrying horses at Aarhus Racetrack, the manufacture of plastic Cuban links in home kitchens, floating forests created by shipyard workers, and collective spray machines developed across all districts of Aarhus. These images, generated through AI, deliberately embrace glitches and impossibilities to question how historical narratives are constructed and repeated.
Aarhus'er #1 doesn't offer a single reading of what was or what could be. Instead, it opens up space for interpretation, uncertainty and collective speculation, asking visitors to consider alternative trajectories for urban development, cultural production, and collective organisation.
