Halfdan Pisket
Dansker-Trilogien
When Halfan Pisket was only 17 years old, he was admitted to the The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated in 2009. In January 2019, he won the award for best comic in Festival International de la Bande Dessinée, which is considered the comic industry’s counterpart to the Cannes Film Festival. Now Halfdan Pisket’s award-winning comic Dansker-Triologien can be experienced at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
The trilogy holds the comics ‘Desertør’, ‘Kakerlak’ and ‘Dansker’. In the first volume, Halfdan Pisket follows the footstep of his father with his upbringing in a small village in the border between Turkey and Armenia and in the second volume, the journey continues to Denmark and a life as an immigrant worker. Finally, the son takes the reader through the father’s criminal reality and describes how it feels to be Danish and to get old.
The story came to life when Halfdan Pisket’s father was diagnosed with incipient dementia for about 11 years ago. At that point, the son saw the opportunity to get to know his father before his memory slowly would fade away. He talked with his father multiple times a week for several years and the story began to take shape, line-for-line. But it is not only a story about a father, it is also about the displaced immigrant, the taxi driver, the greengrocer and the hash dealer, who fight for a place in a foreign society and encounters both violence, caseworkers, friendships and love.
Halfdan Pisket (b. 1985) is a Danish cartoonist and graphic novel writer. When he was only 17 years old, he was admitted to The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 2003-2009. In 2019, he made his debut with the comic Vold written by the author Hans Otto Jørgensen and since then, he has published Hail the Darklord (2012) and Låsesmedsfilerne (2012).
In 2015 Halfdan Pisket received a three years working stipendium as the first ever cartoonist. Dansker-Triologien was first published at the publisher Fahrenheit and was later collected in one book at the publisher Forlaget Gladiator in 2017. This year, the trilogy won the price for best series at Festival International de la Bande Dessinée. He has also been a member of the musician-activist group Albertslund Terrorkorps under the alias VJ Cancer.
The exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg exhibits graphical art works, which Halfdan Pisket has created on top of the cartoon universe as well as sketches, family photos and other materials, which have formed the basis for Dansker-Triologien. Together with the opening, there will be a conversation between Halfdan Pisket and Michael Thouber, director at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
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