The collection

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.

The jumble of cables and tech, sound and smoke hides a broader context: in reality, this work presents two versions of the same composition. The original composition consists of sound fragments from vinyl records, which the artists have cut up and reassembled in new constellations. In this way, the composition incorporates an extensive remix of sound from various eras and genres of music such as opera, German schlager and classical music and even disturbing sounds taken from horror films. The new composition is subsequently transcribed onto sheet music and recorded by an ensemble. In the video collage shown in connection with the installation, the performing musicians alternately step in and out of the picture. With precision and timing, the two versions of the composition play synchronously, while the installation's wealth of hi-fi equipment, video sequences and sculptural setups both play and visualise the composition, inviting the guest to move around and experience the installation's movement, light and sound systems. The contrasting transformation from the original composition of cut-up records to the instrumental recording is evident. At the same time, the two versions complement each other in the exhibition, where the two soundtracks can be followed in parallel. The title of the work reflects the artists' reuse of older vinyl records. In THE MAGIC OF the artists have borrowed from an album by English organist Reginald Dixon: The Magic of Reginald Dixon (Organ Favourites From “Mr. Blackpool”), from which the artists also extract sounds.

Through her self-portraits, Sarah Lucas challenges sexual stereotypes and gender representations. She deliberately portrays herself as a hermaphrodite, wearing big boots, jeans and a T-shirt, and she poses more as a man than as a woman. In Got a Salmon on in The Street #3, Lucas stands on a street, holding up a large photograph of a naked man's lower body. The man is covering his crotch with a squirting can of beer, which he is in the process of opening. The work's ambiguous title illustrates Lucas' penchant for visual jokes. “Salmon” is English slang for the woman's sex, while “got a salmon on” is a paraphrase of “got a hard-on” referring to a man's erection. The title is therefore a juxtaposition of male and female sexuality — exactly like the person on the street who appears as a mixture of male and female. Got a Salmon on in The Street #3 is a critique of a joke, but is also a witty comment in itself. Lucas brilliantly mixes the witty, the sarcastic, the sexual and the inappropriate in her portrayal of an alternative female identity.

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?