As part of the exhibition Aarhus’er #1 (27 June – 2 November 2025), a temporary 15-metre legal graffiti wall has been erected in front of the original entrance to Kunsthal Aarhus. It serves both as a surface for painting and as a cultural intervention—placing a familiar form of expression in an unfamiliar context. Positioned between the sanctioned world of contemporary art and the informal world of graffiti, the wall is open to anyone who wishes to take part: seasoned writers, curious first-time visitors, passers-by, or those experimenting with one of the custom-built collaborative spray machines available on-site.

This wall is not unique. Legal graffiti walls exist in many cities. But placing one here, at the edge of an art institution, opens certain questions: how creative expression is framed, who gets to participate in visual production, and how different forms of knowledge and tradition are valued and circulated. The wall invites action but does not dictate meaning. It will be shaped by those who engage with it, and its significance may shift depending on who sees it—or when.

Over the course of the exhibition, the surface has already changed many times and will continue to do so. Each layer partially covers what came before, while sometimes allowing fragments to show through. In this way, the wall becomes a kind of visual conversation between people who may never meet—an ongoing negotiation between expression and erasure, between the momentary and the archival.

Some may treat the wall as a practice space, a place to test colours or traditional graffiti letterforms. Others may see it as a stage, especially when film crews occasionally use the site for commercial shoots. At such moments, the wall becomes something else: a backdrop, a symbol of spontaneity, a stand-in for authenticity. These shifts are part of the wall’s reality. Its purpose is never fixed, and its meaning is never final.

Sometimes those who once painted illegally return with their children, passing on techniques in a context far removed from the one in which they first learned them. The tools and styles handed down via Style Wars remain much the same, but the meanings change with each generation.

Placed outside the main building, the wall occupies a space both within and beside the institution. It marks an overlap—between formal and informal practices, between so-called amateur creativity and professional exhibition. In this in-between zone, I hope unexpected connections might arise. A graffiti writer may find kinship with the post-conceptual works shown inside. A curator might begin to value more informal or less institutionalised forms of image-making. These are not certainties, but possibilities. The wall doesn’t guarantee them—it simply gestures toward a different kind of exchange.

For me, this is also personal. I began painting graffiti in the 1990s, long before entering the homogenising world of art school. The wall is, in part, a way to revisit that early experience—when colour, gesture, and collective improvisation felt immediate and unguarded. But it’s not just nostalgia. It’s a hope and an experiment: that both graffiti and contemporary art might still find ways to escape the conventions that contain them. That counterculture might not only mirror what it resists, but open something else in the process.

Above the wall, a small sign reads Pligt, nydelse og fællesskab—Duty, pleasure, and community. Borrowed from early Danish labour movement banners, the sign offers a soft and somewhat enigmatic frame for whatever appears on the wall. It links the surface to the broader Frihed, lighed og hiphop project, of which this wall is a part, and hints at an imagined world where all art institutions might one day allow their audiences to paint the walls—not as provocation or outreach, but as a matter of shared space and mutual trust.

The wall offers no single message. It is a temporary surface for trying things out. What it becomes depends on those who engage with it. But beneath each gesture lies more than the moment: an echo of unrealised possibilities. I hope the wall serves as a reminder that within graffiti, politics, and art lie paths not yet taken—alternative models of expression, collectivity, and resistance still waiting to be activated. Not in the form of some universal tradition, but through the local, layered, and often contradictory cultures that shape places like Aarhus: its idiosyncratic blend of politics, contemporary art, and hip-hop; its quiet inventiveness and strange variations.

Establishing a temporary graffiti wall isn’t a solution, or even a clear statement. It’s an opening—an invitation to persue friction between traditions, in the hope of finding new mutual forms of productive misunderstanding, and perhaps even acceptance in deffierence or mutual respect across disciplines and economies.

#frihedlighedoghiphop

Kristoffer ørum @Oerum