Kristoffer Ørum
Most of it was built on other people's work.
Mostly it is admin.
Not a joke.
An artist who makes things up about real places.
Solitary. One person decides what is documented and what is forgotten.
Local. Copenhagen and Aarhus, mostly.
Figures gather for shared meals, sweep longhouse floors, inscribe runes like graffiti, perform stylised rituals, or take part in dance battles and DJ sets using flat stones. The Good, the Lost, and the Beautiful, 2025
In Copenhagen, at Live Art for Kids the project took shape in courtyards, playgrounds, and cultural centres. Mundane Heroics, 2019
The work contributed to ongoing conversations about how digital images and recognition technologies influence our perception of identity and political power. Putins Nose, 2018
At the moment the building site is a site of overlapping and contested imaginaries and Brownfield Wonderland is a celebration of this brief moment where two ideas of what a city is coexist. Brownfield Wonderland, 2022
The series also exists as gallery installations, an artist's book and 3D prints; this is its web form. Would You Like to Know More, 2017
Combining elements from the early labor movement with the local hip-hop culture of the 1990s, the project looks for untapped potential where creativity, community, and enjoyment take center stage. Aalborg Is The Future, 2024
It combines Live Action Role Playing (LARP), performance art, and sculpture, developed in close collaboration with young participants from across the Nordic region. Mundane Heroics, 2019
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. Aarhus'er #1, 2025
Some of the objects broadcasted content directly through custom-built wireless networks. Invisible Objects, 2016
The work was exhibited at ARoS Public's communication centre on the third floor from May to July 2021, alongside works by Danish and international artists including Lawrence Lek, Morehshin Allahyari, Stephanie Dinkins, and others. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
Installation shots show works distributed throughout ship interior. Ebeltoft After The Flood, 2021
The work successfully expanded the "Freedom, Equality and Hip-Hop" series into new institutional and performance contexts. Mr. Spray, 2024
Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care is a twenty-minute video, one of nine works Ørum showed in FORSTADIER / Precursors — a duo exhibition with Aske Thiberg, curated by Morten K Jacobsen and Heidi Hove. Leddyrsomsorg / Arthropod Care, 2026
The exhibition continued this approach, combining speculation with a documentary style to produce objects that felt like remnants of possible futures. The End of the Universe as We Know It?, 2007
The work featured electromagnetic pick-ups installed within body parts of a 3D-printed signal crayfish, comparing fears of digital transformation with concerns about invasive species. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
Kristoffer Ørum’s contribution imagines Malmö as shaped by the afterlives of its industrial past and alternative forms of civic imagination. Even the City Dreams of Being Another, 2025
Taking its starting point in classical ideas about the end of the world, the exhibition mixed anxiety and faith in the future into a playful soap-opera-like narrative, relocating human fate to mysterious experiments of a distant time. The End of the Universe as We Know It?, 2007
The exhibition featured artists working in watercolor and gouache—a medium known for its fluidity and delicate textures—even when their usual practice includes sculptural, video, photographic, or installation-based work. Qua Aqua (Beetroot Texts), 2017
The installation consisted of 3D-printed crayfish models, information screens, video material, and text displays on pink pedestals. Signal_Crayfish, 2020
This is a subjective and living archive - it grows and shifts as time passes and the world changes.
The opening performance on 30 May 2024 was paired with Linnea Langfjord's work on alternative presents focused on care and slowness in the art world. Mr. Spray, 2024
When I use myself as material, my body and my image become a site for institutional self-critique—where paradoxically critique and complicity overlap. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
I believe that vulnerability and the recognition of one’s own inadequacy can create stronger communities than ideals of moral purity. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
The project served as the conceptual foundation for later work on how artificial intelligence could be used to create alternative historical narratives about Danish society. Tank Hip-Hop, 2022
This duality exposes both the shortcomings of surveillance technologies and the alternative forms of perception they enact, offering a mechanical way of seeing that highlights aspects of our species that human vision alone might overlook. Recognised Faces, 2014
These unsolicited “press releases” became part of the ongoing re-imagining of Amager by local government, private enterprise, and other forces. City Planning, 2010
Fed back into the internet, these phantom portraits acted as a small disturbance within systems of profiling maintained by intelligence agencies, corporations and other data collectors. Recognised Faces, 2014
Rather than presenting the institution as a fixed architectural entity, the work represents it as an evolving body defined by the everyday activities, lessons, evaluations, and exchanges taking place within and around it. A Body Has Many Members, 2012
The same book was shown in Interspecies Futures at the Center for Book Arts, New York, in 2021. Signal_Crayfish, 2026
Some pieces he remembers to add, others he forgets.
And we interpret everything through cultural repertoires of symbols and social cues. Watershed, 2025
An actor dressed as The Ballehage Woman roamed the underbush of Marselisborg Forest near the Ballehage neighbourhood every night at dusk for a month. The Ballehage Woman, 2009
Exhibition documented by photographer Mikkel Kaldal. Ebeltoft After The Flood, 2021
The exhibition was the result of several years' work with the three monsters, bringing together elements from numerous performances, exhibitions and interventions both domestically and abroad. Mundane Monsters, 2023
"Perpetual Interpreter" featured works by Kristoffer Akselbo (DK), Andreja Andric (RS/DK), Joana Chicau (PT/NL), Rosemary Lee (US/DK), Winnie Soon (HK/DK), Anders Visti + Tobias Stenberg (DK), and Kristoffer Ørum (DK). Listening Without Ears, 2019
The work used artificial intelligence as a tool for speculative storytelling about Danish social and political history. Mr. Spray, 2024
What emerges is a narrative of the self that is both enacted and undermined by an indifferent system — an algorithmic account of personality, filtered through the lenses of psychology, technology and cultural expectation. AutoBiography, 2011
The publication set out the species' survival capabilities and cross-distance chemical communication systems, positioning the crayfish as superior to human technological networks in this comparison. Signal_Crayfish, 2021
Like Haraway, I believe the only honest critique must come from a situated place—knowledge that is always embodied, compromised, and grounded in specific contexts. None of These Images Are of Me, 2025
One was an animated video about life inside an oyster. Djurs Øhav, 2020