Solo exhibition
Casted rubber, inkjet print, spot lights
2025

“He works without the light. It’s not a rigid principle, rather it’s an unplanned circumstance, almost a coincidence. In fact, he lives to shine, but dirty industries do better under tuxedo-colored skies, under restricted access, under the ground. A certain amount of darkness is required, too, for the street to really pop. For the holes to really open. It’s not a matter of revealing anything private, he’s just convinced about the spiritual value of hungry holes.

He’s headed to the palace. He’s working at the palace tonight. Undecided about whether he pre- fers to take orders or to give them, but what he knows is that he really likes to be involved in quite committing group dynamics. Orgies during office hours or vice versa. A workday is mainly about serving and fixing and then he gets off. A question of opening gates and closing them again before too many enters.

Beneath the palace is the black-dotted sidewalk beneath the black-dotted sidewalk is the shit beneath the armor is the skin beneath the skin is the g-spot. Come and smell. It’s not really a con- crete scent, but it keeps you awake. He enjoys to stroll, he enjoys rushing forward and going down. This whole city used to be wet, he thinks, as he guards his holes. Moist and moldable like wax or infatuated hearts. Very similar to societies, the heart is most stubborn right before it melts.

He has these fantasies about being illuminated. About glorious ascends from the gutter or about outshining nobility crackheads depending on what type of day it is. He is one big invitation, that’s what he gets paid to be, and he is one big hideout, that’s what he can’t help. His conscious thoughts are buried in black shafts, he needs to get rid of them to properly enter the stage, shower in its main-character-beams. The fact that he looks gorgeous and secret is due to vast amounts of vanity. He is eager to stay matte, shiny surfaces are usually less enigmatic and he wants to be scrutinized (but fully never disclosed). He has these fantasies about living in a street-sized fish tank.
Like a club or an ass, he was born to tempt. Streets keep welcoming him, rubber keeps enclosing him, dandies keep craving him, they can’t decide if he looks more like peak perversion or a sunrise. What is sealed is always tempting”

Installation
Flatbed print on glass, concrete cast, photos made in collaboration with erotic photographer and stripper David Johnson
2024

”Street Cast merges the two associations of its title: Casting non professionals in public space as the subjects of the photographs, and literally casting in the street.

The models in the triptych of over-sized photographs are uniformed laborers who work in urban space, and whose occupation is tied to their bodies and the built environment. Bech Jespersen understands this visible labor as also an embodied performance subjected to the public gaze; an erotic spectacle of the body at work, where individuals are transformed into objects of desire and archetypes of masculinity.

Elaborating how the idealized male laboring body – complete with uniforms and props – is a dominant trope in sexual entertainment, Bech Jespersen invited the street casted workers for a photoshoot with the erotic photographer David Johnson, whose past vocation as a male stripper provides a nuanced take on the performativity of work. With nods to the conventions seen in classical erotica’s representation in pop culture, Johnson’s work crystallizes the idea of erotica as fiction and abstraction, rendering quotidian human relations and toil into forms of seduction.

The resulting collaborative works have been printed on large sheets of glass that mimic the smooth surfaces of the modern cityscape (at once transparent and hyper-reflective), and recall the facades of strip clubs and store fronts. In front of the photographs, Bech Jespersen has placed casts from the cityscape, transforming the exhibition into a street and stage for the performers in the images. a threshold that demarcates certain forms of activity, presentation and movement – a liminal bridge between the public and the private.

Conflating theater, striptease, and the street, Bech Jespersen calls attention to how all architecture is a choreographing of the body, a site for performativity that sets a scene and influences the actions of its occupants. Architecture depends on the human body for its proportions, while the body in turn finds and understands itself through architecture. Street Cast exposes the eroticism of this relationship, as well as the erotics of labor itself, by investigating how masculine sexuality, seduction and desire are coded within our urban environment”