The collection

Do you know the feeling of losing your footing? Of how hard it can be to feel at home? Karolin Schwab's floating house stands in the middle of the lagoon that surrounds ARKEN. The house has no walls or furniture. The roof is the sky, and the floor is the flowing water. Nothing stands still. It is up to you, your imagination and the surrounding landscape to fill the empty house with meaning. In a world in constant movement, how do you stand firm on shaky ground?

A fountain is a beautiful, cool oasis in a lush garden. The pinnacle of beauty and rejuvenation. Can you think of a more refined interpretation of nature's life-giving spring? At ARKEN, the water trickles merrily from a bountiful bouquet of glass breasts in pinks and browns, flowing into the fountain's basin surrounded by lush green plants. The female body - symbol of the forces of nature and fertility - is transformed into a surreal, suckling fantasy creature in its own ecosystem.

Butterflies are associated with beauty, transformation and rebirth. But take a closer look at their beautiful wings. Suddenly, images emerge from historical events: the 1973 coup d'état in Chile, the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, and the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001. All 68 butterflies in the series are linked to political events that have taken place where each species lives. What is beautiful at first glance becomes gruesome. A transformation has taken place.

Refugee by accident. Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1975, as a young woman, she travelled on holiday to London. But civil war broke out and suddenly she couldn't return home. She was cut off from home — symbolized by a kitchen, the traditional domain of women. But in Hatoum's kitchen, danger and conflict lurk. The floor is covered with graters and herb choppers like sharp, electrified creepy crawlies. Take care you don't get shocked.

Play for life! A boy on a rocking horse welcomes you to ARKEN, beckoning you into the ARKEN's forecourt. Six feet tall and cast in bronze, like a genuine equestrian statue. Only Elmgreen & Dragset's equestrian statue would rather celebrate play and imagination than victory and power in war. It is a witty and sharp critique of society's power structures by the Danish-Norwegian artist duo.

Life is a journey from birth to death. Each passenger travels with his or her own suitcase full of cultural heirlooms, consumption habits and human experiences. If you had to draw your life as a journey, what and who would be drawn on your map? What has shaped you into who you are today? In this tapestry, the little schoolgirl with plaits and a Christ-like doll, the young man, the Madonna with the Chanel bag - not the baby Jesus - and the aging clerk with the briefcase appear as images of the various stages of life. But they are also people like you and me, dressed in and surrounded by things, symbols and trademarks that speak about gender and identity. Only the newborn and the dead are naked.

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 the work “Top Suite”, we see the artist posing in a white cloth, photographed from the front and back, respectively. On her head, she holds a triangular shape that hides her face like a giant hat, marking a game of visibility and invisibility. At the same time, the triangular shape transforms the artist's body into an anonymous sculpture calling to mind the goddess statues of antiquity. The contrasts between the living body, the frozen action and the unidentifiable object accentuate the work's mystique.

An old wagon wheel on the wall lit up in gorgeous colours. Reflective metal foil behind coloured plexiglass. Leaping dolphins and colours in a controlled flow across the canvas. Anselm Reyle's paintings and sculptures are dazzlingly beautiful or shameless clichés, depending on who's looking. The large formats, the perfect workmanship and the seductive colours and materials raise questions such as: Can cheap scrap become precious art? And do we prefer to be pandered to or provoked by the art we experience?

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.