Jesper Just is a Danish artist, who lives and works in New York. From 1997 to 2003, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Just uses film technology and installation strategies as vehicles to create work that addresses complex contemporary issues through open-ended visual narratives rich in detail and metaphorical import, using a mixture of multiple video channels, sound installations, live performance and sculptural and architectural interventions. Just has works in over twenty-five museum collections, such as Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London and Museum of Modern Art in New York. Just works exclusively in film, shooting on a variety of film stock, including 8 mm, 16 mm and 35 mm. His works which date from 2003 and before were recorded in digital video. All of his later works were shot on film and then transferred to high-definition video. The resulting images are dense and atmospheric. Their prominent soundtracks are conceived specifically for each film in co-operation with different musicians. His works have been shown throughout Europe and the United States, including at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum and the Witte de With in Rotterdam. His exhibitions include Romantic Delusions at the Brooklyn Museum, U-Turn at the Copenhagen Quadrennial in Denmark and the Liverpool Biennial in the UK. Servitudes was on show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from June 24 to September 13, 2015.
Artistic practice
Just's films are moody, atmospheric narratives often with ambiguous and unresolved storylines. Thematically, his film works revolve around "the complex inter-relations between sexuality, love and cinema". Many of his older films specifically question conventional notions of masculinity. Nina Folkersma wrote, "A real man is supposed to contain his emotions, to be inviolable, intellectual, pragmatic, virile, and dominant. That, at least, is the image of man portrayed in most Hollywood films. Transgressing social and cinematographic conventional representations of masculinity is a crucial element of Just’s work." Just uses Hollywood conventions as a kind of backdrop for his narratives. His films surprise the viewer with unexpected plot twists and characters stepping out of their expected roles. In Invitation to Love, for instance, a young man takes off his shoes and dances barefoot on a table for an older man. A press release that introduced his A Voyage in Dwelling exhibition, sats, "Just's videos attempt to dissect the nature of human interaction and the awkwardness of relationships. As in "A Vicious Undertow" - a seductive pas de trois between a middle-aged woman, and a younger woman and man – Just often seeks to emphasize the absurdity of gender roles and the way which cultures generate them. He presents charged relationships that could be perceived as perverse and endows them with beauty and dignity." The film A Vicious Undertow marks a change in Just’s oeuvre. It is the first film that uses a female protagonist. This development can be followed throughout Just's newer films up to 2008. In an article in Frieze, Eliza Williams notes, "Far from naturalistic, his films contain a deliberate ambiguity, which, while at times unsettling, allows for an emotional resonance that speaks of a meaning above and beyond mere storytelling." Influences of film noir aesthetics are present in his work and Just reveres the films of iconic directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Bob Fosse, Alain Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Michelangelo Antonioni. He employs a reappearing cast of professional actors, dancers and opera singers.
