Danish artist delivers blank artwork and keeps the money: “This is not theft”

The “Work it out” exhibition has been running in the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg for a few days now. What is work, why do we work? Are there limits to our work life? How can we create a more sustainable way of working for the individual and society in the future? And how can art give us new insights about new ways of working? The museum asked various artists to express their vision in several works.

One of them was Jens Haaning (56), a conceptual artist from Denmark. In his work he emphasizes power and inequality. The museum commissioned Haaning to recreate two of his previous works. “An average Danish annual income” (“An average Danish annual income, red) from 2007 consisted of money notes that Haaning had pasted on a canvas. With Danish kroner (because Denmark does not use the euro), the artist depicted the average annual income in Denmark, as the title says. In 2011, Haaning made a similar work, about the Austrian annual income, this time with euros.

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