Jesper Just – Interoceptions, 2024

Jesper Just’s practice revolves around video and installation, which he often combines in architecturally complex environments. Transferring the codes and techniques of cinema into the realm of visual art, his works break viewers’ expectations of narrative arc and dramaturgy. By creating enigmatic and ambiguous situations, he encourages the audience to focus not on the words spoken or the actions performed by the characters, but on the emotions, mental states and relationships conveyed by the works.

The video installation Interoceptions moves through a forest, continuously metamorphing between day and night, disrupting time-space. As the forest is filmed six times during one day a timely weaving of displaced moments compose a pictorial unity. Performing as a panoramic time machine, the installation with its circling movements and landscape view is at the same time visually hinting at pre-cinematic entertainment rides and implicating the invention of the spectator as both a nature wanderer and a static visual consumer. Installed on a wooden structure, the represented forest relates to itself as material, performing an inside-out connection between forest and supporting structure as well as between the exhibition space and the cinematic space. In ancient roman civilization, the woods surrounding city communities would serve as asylums for displaced people, thus forming borderline socialities. The otherworldly scenography played out in the video suggests an openness to alternative logics of citizenship and an increased receptivity to civilization’s in-between spaces.