Aarhus City Hall was completed in 1941, designed by Arne Jacobsen, but in 2018 municipal employees, led by the mayor, began constructing a tower on its roof using recycled materials and the city’s own scaffolding. Every Thursday – the designated development day – the structure grows as civil servants rap building instructions to engineers and tax officers. The façade is repainted weekly with new patterns and colours, coordinated through the collective hand signals taught in induction courses. The mayor personally oversees painting from a scaffold, while departments compete to create the wildest designs on their section of the tower.
Aarhus’er #1
Kristoffer Ørum & Emilio Hestepis: Aarhus’er #1 Kunsthal Aarhus closed on 2 November 2025
Aarhus’er #1 is a collaborative exhibition by artist Kristoffer Ørum and rapper Emilio Hestepis. Together, they reimagine the city of Aarhus through hip-hop, DIY culture and artificial intelligence, transforming Kunsthal Aarhus into a fictional version of the city shaped by alternative rhythms, graffiti and speculative memory.
The exhibition presents a 15-metre legal graffiti wall, a giant record player, lo-fi mixtapes, deepfakes, DIY furniture, and historical snapshots from a city that could have been. At its centre is hip-hop—not as a fixed genre, but as a set of evolving loca l practices. DJing, MCing, breakdance and graffiti appear in distorted, Aarhus-specific forms that blur fact and fiction, protest and play.
The show is the most expansive chapter to date in Ørum’s ongoing counterfactual project Frihed, lighed og hip-hop. But here, that work becomes something new—a shared platform developed in close collaboration with Hestepis, who also contributes an original soundtrack.
With thanks to Katrine Malinovsky, Mathias Borello, Hannah Mathiesen Keegan, Michael Bolt Fisher, Salling, Batch Productions, Brian Sørensen, Tania Ørum, and many more.
