St. Chads Projects Presents Lions by Esben Weile Kjær in London

The stories cities tell about themselves require a certain kind of creature to hold the underside. Not the ones that circle monuments or nest in civic statuary, the ones that move in the dark, beneath the palace floor, under the stored crown jewels.

What such a creature means depends entirely on who is telling the story: pest to some, emblem to others, sleeping giant to a few. The body itself does not change. It waits.

There is a particular force in elevation, in taking what a culture has decided to despise and casting it in gold. The gold does not sanitize. It insists. It argues that the creature was already worth looking at, that the problem was never the creature.

To name a rat Lion is not irony. It is a corrective. The animal has not changed, only the naming has.

St. Chads Project Space, the former hospital storage room near King's Cross where Esben Weile Kjær has installed Lion, is not a white cube. It is a holding room: white-painted brick walls, black polished concrete floor, strip lighting running along the industrial ceiling.

The space carries the memory of institutional function, things were stored here, processed, held. Kjær's golden inflatable rat now occupies it so completely that there is no vantage point from which to take it all in. The visitor steps through the doorway and meets the animal head-on.

Lion (2025, fabric, motor) is rendered in deep gold, a surface that catches the overhead light unevenly, shifting between brilliance and shadow as you move around it. Up close, the fabric reveals what it is: seamed, stitched, assembled from panels. Concentric circles of thread surround what appears to be the inflation point, almost like a target, or a navel, or the slow ripple of something just dropped into still water. The eye is small, sunken, apparently closed. The paws are tucked. The tail coils somewhere behind the body. Nothing about the posture suggests aggression. This animal is sleeping, or holding something that carries the weight of sleep.

The work holds several lines of thought at once. Kjær grew up within the political symbolism of this particular creature: in Denmark, the rat has served as an emblem across the full ideological spectrum, from punk and queer subcultures to far-right nationalist groups, appearing on flags and posters at demonstrations organized by opposing sides of the same social fracture. The artist himself spent formative years in Copenhagen squats and was active in protests against the rise of right-wing extremism in the late 1980s and 1990s. That biographical fact does not resolve the image, it deepens its ambiguity. An emblem that means opposing things simultaneously belongs to no one.

Kjær has also folded into Lion the legend of Holger Danske, Ogier the Dane, the warrior from the time of Charlemagne who lies dormant beneath Kronborg Castle, the royal residence where Shakespeare set Hamlet, and who, so the story goes from the 13th century onward, will awaken only when Denmark faces mortal danger.

The structural rhyme is precise: rats beneath Rosenborg Castle where the crown jewels are stored; a warrior sleeping beneath another royal foundation; a golden animal installed in a former hospital room in North London, breathing by motor, waiting for nothing in particular. Or waiting, perhaps, for the right moment.

The exhibition is titled Lions, plural, regal, heraldic. The work inside is a single sleeping rat. That gap between name and thing is where Kjær's argument lives.

The sculpture does not announce itself.

It does not argue. It simply holds the room, filling it from wall to wall, making the visitor a guest in something else's territory. What was always beneath the surface, it seems to say, was larger than expected.

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