Jeppe Hein

Illuminated Benches is an installation consisting of twelve benches arranged to form two horseshoes. The weight of the person leaning on it causes the long neon bars placed horizontally under each seat to light up, illuminating the underside of the bench in pinkish white, yellow, red, ice blue, blue or green. 

Jeppe Hein thus makes the benches a relational and interactive object: when they are not lit, they blend in with the others, but when they are lit, they expose the choice of relationship between the different seated subjects, marking their distribution and proximity. Similarly, one person illuminating a bench makes one’s momentary loneliness more apparent. 

“My art should be a means of communication and interaction between visitor, work and space that can change people’s idea of their expectations of art,” Hein explains. Direct involvement thus helps the spectator, sometimes unaware of relating to a work of art, to overcome the passive contemplation typical of museums, without having to overcome any social or language barriers.  

Interaction and participation are at the core of Jeppe Hein’s (Copenhagen, 1974) work who, since the late 1990s, has created works for public spaces in different parts of the world and exhibited in some of the world’s best-known museums. His Modified Social Benches (benches shaped to create multi-level seating, often with slides) were set up in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and in 2022 the Moderna Museet in Stockholm dedicated a major solo exhibition to him entitled Who are you... really? and Jeppe Hein's recent solo exhibitions include SMK Thy - National Gallery, Denmark (2024).   

Silvia Maria Sara Cammarata