In the trailer for Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl’s video work ODE (2015), we see a close-up of a knife being thrust into the grass at a burial site. The scene is from the film, which Mejdahl describes as a family vendetta, and it sets the tone for his practice which centers on autobiographical processing, masculinity, and the transformation of the dark and monstrous into something loving and intimate.

 

In ODE, Mejdahl explores how revenge can heal trauma, which the father’s personal collapse and violent death have inflicted upon the family. By embracing rage and violence, Mejdahl overturns the role of the victim that the father has imposed upon him, turning it into an active, creative force that transforms the horrific and unpleasant into something that can be passed on.

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The father figure and the transformation of the personal history are recurring themes in Mejdahl’s universe. In the theatre production FRISKABTE (Freed) (2023), based on the father’s story, Mejdahl once again sheds light on the father figure and the dark role he has played in Mejdahl’s memory. Here, he examines the normative patriarchal structures to which both the father and Mejdahl himself have been oppressed and explores the vulnerability within the masculine self-image that they have both struggled with. In the depiction of the father as a creative figure, who during a period in which he earned a living as a pastry chef, Mejdahl fosters a sense of identification and a creative bond between the two, and in the piece Kagehovedet (Cake Head) (2026) he recreates a cake his father baked when Mejdahl was a child. The cake — a toxic-green head inspired by a satirical drawing of a sad sun — thus emerges as the creative father’s self-portrait, a symbolic resurrection and liberation through his violent death.

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The transformation of the dark and destructive into a generative force is also found in the eco-gothic music video Hour of Moth (2020). Here, we see Mejdahl himself lying on the forest floor, summoning the angels of the night through his song as animated swarms of moths descend upon his body. The work is an invocation of nature’s dark forces, the bog’s witches and deadly elements of nature, which are as central to nature as its life-giving and beautiful aspects. At a time of climate crises and ecological collapse, the work suggests that there is a spiritual and emotional understanding of nature’s monstrousness that can unite us with the mist hanging over the bog.

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The dichotomy between the deeply dark, demonic, and horror-infused on the one hand, and the camp, slapstick-like, and unapologetically celebratory on the other, forms a central nerve in Mejdahl’s practice. In his works, he oscillates effortlessly between these opposing poles, letting them merge into one another or transforming them through a shift in perspective — from darkness to light, and back again. In the exhibition En! Gang Til! (2023) at Rønnebæksholm, he drew on a childhood memory from the nearby amusement park BonBon-Land, whose worn-out 1990s aesthetic has often been dismissed as low culture. Through an anti-hierarchical queer perspective, Mejdahl elevates BonBon-Land’s absurd figures into collective mythological beings within a gesamtkunstwerk that draws on the grotesque universe of Hieronymus Bosch. The works in the exhibition are thus driven by a care for the culture we have rejected, and by an embrace of the child who recognized himself in the figures’ shameless queerness.

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Through queer theory, we can learn how conscious shifts in perspective and (mis)readings of our shared cultural history can produce new understandings of gender. In collaboration with KØN – Gender Museum Denmark, Mejdahl adopts a consciously ‘queer’ perspective on patriarchal structures, through which his viewpoint emerges as an expression of a masculine tendency toward self-destruction. Through dream interpretation, he explores how violence becomes embedded in the masculine psyche, and how men can distance themselves from their own vulnerability in order to rise within patriarchy.

In the work P Poem (2025), he has recruited men through the homosexual dating app Grindr and written a poem on their bodies. The poem, created in collaboration with the Danish author Bjørn Rasmussen, functions as a form of self-incantation. An opening through which man may come to see both his gender and genitals through a homosexual gaze marked by tenderness and care. A healing of masculine trauma, an embrace of the dark and monstrous within all of us, which may ultimately set us free.

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- Louise Steiwer, art critic and curator