Audience Award 2025

By Lina Hashim

“In this pink universe, it is easy to forget where you are, it is cozy here with an almost homely atmosphere.”

Kristine Baagland's installation Entrance K is a disturbing plunge into the artist’s personal and institutional space, exploring the boundaries between public and private within the institutional framework of the psychiatric system. Taking the pink-lined, almost surreally cosy corridors of Aarhus University Hospital in Skejby as its starting point, the work unfolds a critical dialogue between the artist’s own psychiatric experiences and the public perception of psychiatric facilities.

The work consists of 756 shredded A4 pages, Baagland’s psychiatric health records from the period 2017-2025, making it both extremely personal and yet universal in its appeal. Shredding, as an action, serves as a powerful visual and conceptual symbol of the desire for confidentiality combined with the fragmentary memories and identities that psychiatric patients often must navigate.

This document destruction also comments on the administrative and bureaucratic aspect of psychiatric institutions, where one’s personal history is reduced to archival material and notes, mere elements in a daily office job. For healthcare professionals, this is just routine; for the patient, it is a document of one’s most fragile moments.

The installation’s spatial and colour elements encapsulate the contrast that exists between the ’cosy’ pink surroundings and the intense, often painful experiences that transpire in the rooms. This duality sheds light on the paradoxes that can arise in psychiatric environments where homeliness and the hospitalisation context collide.

Entrance K challenges the visitor to reflect on how institutional environments designed to heal often evoke feelings of isolation and alienation. Through the use of the colour pink, Baagland sheds light on the glaring contrast between the outer façade and the inner realities of mental illness – a duality that is both absurd and deeply tragic.

By blending the aesthetic with the personal and political, Entrance K stands as a vital contemporary art work that seeks not only to shed light on the artist’s own experiences, but also to initiate a broader dialogue around mental health, patient rights, and the role of the public health service in the treatment of mental disorders.

Kristine Baagland (born 2000) Lives and works in Aarhus.
In addition to visual art, Kristine Baagland also works with poetry and poetry readings and she is an active member of Unge Danske Digtere (Young Danish Poets).
@baagland.kunst

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Second most votes - 94 for Amanda Højlund with the drawing Lys på lys (KP25).
Third most votes - 62 for the Swedes Inger Thurfjell, Sharon Hedman, Anita Lundgren and Mikael Thurfjell with the joint work My grandmother's piano (KP25).