The collection

Four men pose in an arid desert landscape with sparse vegetation and a blue sky. One of the characters — a nearly bald man with sunglasses — stands with his back straight and legs spread as if he were urinating. The other three are dressed in streetwear and wearing animal masks depicting a lion, a duck and a gorilla. The lion and duck are throwing hand signs. The work is as big as a billboard. It depicts a meeting between artist Claus Carstensen and the art collective known as Superflex — two different generations of artists. Carstensen was Superflex's professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the early 1990s and has produced experimental and provocative paintings since the 1980s. He is known to have urinated on several of his paintings. Claus Carstensen is also from a generation of artists who work alone. Superflex is an artist collective that, since the 1990s, has created political and activist art projects which glide seamlessly in and out of society's economic and social mechanisms. Their works often unfold where art and commercial interests meet. Wearing animal masks in the photograph, they unite and blur their individual identities.

Wolfgang Tillmans maintains the fleeting moments in his highly personal and vulnerable photographs. The German photographer has portrayed famous musicians and cultural personalities, depicted the nightlife of the club scene and shot fashion campaigns. But he also documents his life as though his images were a diary. Intimate photos of his friends, fruit and cigarette butts on a windowsill, flowers and landscapes. Everything is equally significant, and everything has potential when Tillmans aims his camera lens at it. By allowing the motifs to speak for themselves, Tillmans encourages us to understand his images on a personal level. Fruit on a windowsill can call to mind art history's classic, lavish displays of perishable fruit and flowers that remind us how beautiful and ephemeral life is. Tillmans' motifs are humble, but they share the same sensibility. A raw and romantic approach to an everyday scenario from a kitchen windowsill, without it being elevated to more than it is.

Love Story, a video installation by Candice Breitz, examines how identification and empathy are produced. The work is based on the personal narratives of six people about fleeing their country due to various oppressive conditions: Sarah Ezzat Mardini, who fled war-torn Syria; José Maria João, a former child soldier from Angola; Mamy Maloba Langa, a survivor of rape from the Democratic Republic of Congo; Shabeena Saveri, an Indian trans person and activist; Luis Nava Molero, a political dissident from Venezuela; and Farah Abdi Mohamed, a young atheist from Somalia. The work provides insight into the global scale of the refugee crisis. It is based on extensive video interviews with the six people recorded in the cities where they are seeking or have been granted asylum (two interviews took place in Berlin, two in New York and two in Cape Town). Candice Breitz's ambitious video installation 'Love Story' was a highlight at the Biennale Arte in Venice in 2017, and thanks to generous support from the New Carlsberg Foundation, the work is now part of ARKEN's collection.

In Space-Time Foam (2016), 56 purple foam mattresses are stacked like soft tongues in a huge pile. On top lie various silvery objects. Some are reminiscent of giant sperm or earpieces. Next to the pile lies a stack of posters telling a cryptic story about gender, body, sex and physique. Together, Lea Porsager's video and installation form a fantasy of moving in and out of a body. Like neutrinos, the elementary particles created by The Big Bang, which can move freely through the body and the universe because they have almost no density. Listen to more about Lea Porsager's work and practice in the podcast series ARKEN Stories here.

Forget everything you know about the world for a moment and pay attention to what you're sensing right now. Is the temperature hot or cold? Are your clothes soft? Heavy or lightweight? Do you sense the heat from your computer or the smooth surface of your smartphone screen? The body's senses play a crucial role in how we experience the world around us — and the sensual body is central to Tove Storch's work. Storch's Untitled consists of countless layers of delicate silk in soft hues. The silk is pulled tight around an aluminum frame in a quadratic shape and flows like a waterfall of soft folds stretching across the floor. With this work, Storch invites you to let your mind go and instead allow your eyes to wander over the sculpture and 'feel' it. Can you sense the wrinkled textile surface and the cool metal?