Looking Outwards with Courtesy

It’s late on a cold Tuesday evening and I sit before my laptop, a warm peppermint tea between my hands, in anticipation of a conversation I’ve long been waiting to have. As I wait, I look around my room and notice the season sticking to my windows in droplets. I watch in fascination as patterns emerge in the condensation, before making a mental note to remove the nearby books so as to avoid the mould which creeps ever-closer towards my shelves. While ruminating on where I would reposition said books – the opposite wall, or upon the desk, or maybe in the living room – Najaaraq Vestbirk, better known by her alias Courtesy, appears on my screen, her face lit by a small lamp in the corner of her Berlin bedroom. And almost instantly, I forgot my hands – and my books – were ever cold.

Najaaraq Vestbirk is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans music and far beyond. Traversing installation, composition, DJing (and currently a resident on NTS), performance, photography and video, Vestbirk has carved out her niche between sound and contemporary art. What lies at the intersection of these varying disciplines is an interest in the collective exchange that can occur through performance and the ways an artist can dissolve the barrier between themselves and the audience. 

Following the release of her debut EP Night Journeys in 2022 and later, Violence of the Moodboard in 2023, the artist has produced her first LP fra eufori – translating literally to “from euphoria” – which brings an ambient twist to some of the most loved trance and Eurodance tracks from the Eighties through to the early Noughties. While other releases such as Night Journeys, made when the artist experienced a period of insomnia, are fuelled by introspection, her latest is more of a research project than a self exploration.  “I’ve started to find being in my own feelings, and making work in relation to that, a little bit boring,” she says, “I just don’t find that particularly interesting anymore. This project was really me starting to look outwards, as opposed to inwards.”

For Vestbirk, looking outwards meant researching into the tracks that have had a profound impact on the history of dance and pop music, both nostalgic and irksome. From Madonna’s What It Feels Like For A Girl to You’re Not Alone by Olive, “fra eufori” plays with some of the most memorable tracks of the last three decades – tracks that have, over time, been covered countless times by other artists. In reinterpreting these tracks, and their subsequent covers, Vestbirk explores how  sounds can change and morph with each shift in authorship – like the final story told at the end of a game of telephone, a story that changes with each whisper. 

“They’re not necessarily my favourite tracks,” she says, when I ask what they mean to her. “And they don’t necessarily have any personal value to me, though some do certainly remind me of going to my first discos as a kid in Denmark. I was more interested in the collective memory associated with those songs and their wider impact and historical value on pop culture and dance music,” she shares, my fascination toward the release growing with each word. 

“In music, it’s a very non-typical thing to work with sounds that you don’t artistically identify with,” she continues. “It was a learning process, getting close to these materials and questioning why these particular tracks were hits and not others from that time. I was curious about the contexts in which they were made. Was it the timing that made them so successful or was it the artists themselves?” 

Through fra eufori, Vestbirk continues to blur the line between DJ, musician, and performance artist, collapsing the boundaries between each. With one foot in contemporary art and the other in music/club culture, Vestbirk’s practice in either of those spaces is concerned with the idea of sharing space through performance. And, in doing so, dissolving this supposed boundary between artist and audience both in the club and in the gallery. 

Early last year, I went to a label night at Berghain, this one being Kulør’s – Vestbirk’s label-cum-multidiscliplinary studio. Under her alias, Courtesy began her set, and the euphoric sounds of Night Journeys I penetrated the cavernous dance hall, touching the skin and senses of all who moved upon the floor. Out from the middle of a crowd broke out a performance by a dancing collective choreographed by multidisciplinary artist Esben Weile Kjær. We all ushered into  a circle around the dancers. In a state of awe, I watched as these bodies intertwined and interwove themselves within one another while collectively suspending one body in the air. Some were down upon the ground, others threw themselves up to signal their moment of collective suspension. I watched as they contorted their bodies in the most beautiful ways, touching each other so delicately and yet with such intensity. It was then, in that moment, I understood that Vestbirk saw DJIng as a performance art that could exist in spaces within and far beyond the club context.

“The aspect that I find really interesting about DJing,” she tells me, “and I don’t mean this in a voyueristic way but in a way of participation, is truly noticing how a room works and how people are affected by certain things. People don’t realise, but I can see everything when I’m playing a set. Once your eyes adjust to the dark, and if you are really paying attention, you can see so many dynamics unfold within this space. Within the art world, there’s much more space potential for detail which allows me to extract those elements I find interesting on the dance floor and explore them in a new way.”

Within this gallery context, Vestbirk’s performances unfold in a way that feels emblematic of the dance floor – there remains this same sense of collective euphoria, collective consciousness that is so intrinsic to the act of dancing with other bodies. Her latest performance, on the occasion of the release of fra eufori, was held at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler with Eddington Again, Francesca Burattelli, Sophie Joe, DimEttra, and Soyklō. These artists were invited to reinterpret five songs, adding another layer to and enriching the auditory and physical experience of the album and the idea of authorship. 

“I’m always working with people that come from the club culture community, I’m not hiring an actor to interpret what club dance music culture is. It’s people I know, people that I’m close to.”

Working in closeness with people is a foundational element of the artist’s upcoming video project – coinciding with a future release – which explores what it means to live and exist in a city as a young person. “I was thinking a lot about albums that encapsulate this idea of existing in a city sonically, and one that always comes to mind is Burial’s Untrue,” she tells me. “It’s a brilliantly produced record, and some tracks have intros of people talking. It has a real feeling of a sort of documentary, that you’re in a city and not a studio. It’s like sitting inside an apartment in London and you’re feeling the melancholy and the loneliness and the beauty and the love that comes with it.

“I’m interested in getting closer to the people around me, to understand how they feel and navigate themselves through the city, and capturing this through sound and imagery. In a way, it’ll be a very personal project but not because it’s about me. It’s personal in the way that Tillmans took photos of his friends,” she shares.

And in doing so, once again, looking outwards.