“The foregoing reflections are concerned with the riddle of art, the riddle that is art itself. They are far from claiming to solve the riddle. The task is to see the riddle"

-Martin Heidegger, Art and Space, 1969.

11 Entries brings together a selection of eleven object-based works by Torben Ebbesen spanning the past two decades. Installed within the intimate basement space of Boiler, the exhibition takes on the character of a cabinet of curiosities. Here, the attention is drawn to a key aspect of Torben Ebbesen’s practice: His ability to draw out the unexpected from what already exists, opening up a space for discovery and curiosity.

Through their diverse material compositions and evocative titles, Torben Ebbesen’s works seem to reach outward, engaging both the world and the viewer. Synthetic and processed materials are set alongside metals, minerals, and naturally occurring elements such as leaves, bark, and feathers. At the same time, the works resist obvious interpretation. At first glance, the viewer appears to be confronted with the impossible task of solving a riddle. Yet, as with Heidegger, Torben Ebbesen does not seek to provide definitive answers. Instead, his works create a space in which something new can emerge—a space for reflection, attentiveness, and wonder.

In this sense, Torben Ebbesen’s work operates less as representation and more as a mode of inquiry. The unfamiliar meets the familiar in the interplay of materials, their convergences and tensions. Meaning arises in the shifting intersection between perception and language, between the man-made and the natural.

Throughout his career, Torben Ebbesen has explored the encounter between human inventiveness and the given world. At a time when the boundaries between the natural and the artificial are increasingly blurred, and when technology and artificial intelligence enable the continuous accumulation, storage, and circulation of information, knowledge, and images, Torbens Ebbesen insists on sustaining—and making visible—the riddle of art. By reworking and recombining familiar elements, he subtly shifts our perspective, allowing the world to appear anew, in ways that remain open and unresolved.

Torben Ebbesen’s works probe the limits of an ordered and systematised world, suggesting that the new does not necessarily lie in inventing something entirely different, but in altering how we see and understand what is already there.