Jens Haaning

Haaning was originally supposed to recreate two pieces from 2007 and 2010 that used real cash affixed to canvases to show the average annual income of Danes and Austrians, respectively.

When the transport boxes with Haaning’s work arrived, museum staff opened them to find two framed blank canvases entitled Take the Money and Run.

The judgment, published on 18 September 2023, deducted 40,000 Danish Kroner ($5,700) from the repayment amount, allowing Haaning to keep it as an artist and display fee since the museum did end up using Take the Money and Run in the exhibition [5].

Haaning's main exhibitions: Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany (2002), the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2005), Traffic at CAPC Museé d'art contemporain, Bordeaux, France (1996), Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria (1997, 1998, 2007), Publicness at ICA, London, England (2003), the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2002, 2006) and Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden (2017) showed Haaning’s works from the 1990s until 2017.

Examples of his interventions in institutional structures or public spaces include: Middelburg Summer 1996 (1996), a temporary relocation of a factory employing immigrant workers to the exhibition space in De Vleeshal, Middelburg, The Netherlands; and Turkish Jokes (1994), a sound piece with a tape-recording of jokes, told by Turks in their native language, which was originally played in a public square in Oslo, Norway.