“You still don't know my name” – An exhibition at KØN that won't let go

It's Sunday morning at the Cathedral Square in Aarhus. A bit chilly and grey, and yet there's a long queue of people along the facade of KØN – Museum for Kønnenes Kulturhistorie. It's March 8th, International Women's Day, and the museum has just opened its doors for free admission on the occasion of the day. I've come to see their exhibition: “You still don't know my name”.

The exhibition is located on the 3rd floor, at the top of the old museum building, up in the attic. It's rustic and feels more like walking in an old attic than in a museum. And here the exhibition fits in perfectly. Because what awaits in the four smaller rooms up here is definitely not smooth or neatly wrapped. It's raw and dense and hard to shake off.

The curtain that opens a world

The first thing you encounter when you enter the exhibition is a picture with the title in large letters: YOU STILL DON'T KNOW MY NAME. And then the curtains.

Pernille Albrechtsen, Head of Education and Communication at KØN – Gender Museum Denmark, explained it to us visitors. The central image in the exhibition is a woman standing with her back to the photographer and pulling a curtain aside slightly. It is precisely that image that has inspired the entire expression of the exhibition and it is no coincidence.

The curtains are the entrance to a world that few of us know. It is a world where migrant sex workers, clients and backers alike have their way. As Pernille put it: “we are in a way invited behind a curtain, into a world that many of us normally don’t have access to.” It is a world that exists right here, along the roads and in houses you drive past.

That's exactly what the two documentary photographers Louise Herrche Serup and Sarah Hartvigsen Juncker have been doing since 2021. They have driven 18.000 kilometers on Danish roads and visited 152 clinics and brothels. Not to expose, but to listen. To ask the migrant sex workers who work there who they really are and what they dream of.

As one of the cast members told photographers during a visit, “no one asks how I’m doing.”
That was exactly what they wanted to do differently.

Houses we know and don't know

The rooms are filled with photographs of houses. Large pictures of dilapidated buildings along the roads. Houses with numbers on the doors, mailboxes by the driveways, and curtains on the windows.

Houses you may have driven past a hundred times without thinking about.

The photographers have deliberately chosen repetition as a visual device. The same type of house. The same type of room. Over and over again, because that is exactly what reality looks like for a migrant sex worker. They typically live in the same house for two to fourteen days before being moved on to a new location. Sometimes they don't know where it is.

Between the pictures of houses hang the portraits. Some show their faces, while others have chosen not to. It has always been the individual's own choice. The photographers used analogue cameras to avoid metadata that could link time and place to a person. Images, houses and texts are deliberately mixed so that no one can be identified.

Above one of the pictures, of a gray house with bare trees, seven words are handwritten directly on the wall:
"I don't believe in love anymore."

The women's own words

Between photographs on the walls hang texts that are quotes from migrant sex workers themselves. Anonymous, direct and without filter.
“My family doesn’t know what I’m going through. They think I’m living the good life because I can send money home to them every day… When I think about all the men I’ve been with, I sometimes sit and cry and hate myself.”

And somewhere else, shorter and more poignant: “Right now I’m not happy. I’d be lying if I said I was happy. I swear.”

And then there's the book

A physical book that is out in front of you so you can leaf through it. The book contains reviews from Eroguide.dk, a Danish online forum with over 30.000 members. Here, customers rate sex workers on a scale such as location, appearance, the sex itself and “chance of repetition.”

It's uncomfortable to read.

One place in the book is printed a single sentence, written by a user:
"You visit a prostitute and call their lifestyle the worst you can think of? Maybe you're the one who needs to wake up."

I was close to breaking into tears several times as I stood leafing through the book. From something that seemed like anger and helplessness at the same time.

Knowledge and context

The last room is quieter. Here you can sit down and read up on research and legislation. About psychological consequences, which according to associate professor Torben Bechmann Jensen from the University of Copenhagen can include PTSD, depression and self-hatred, but which are not a given. About the legislation from 1999, which made it legal to sell sex, but is criticized for making the work more dangerous.
This is the space you need after the previous three.

An exhibition that demands something from you

“You still don't know my name” is not an easy exhibition. Nor is it designed to be. The photographs alone are powerful. They are large, calm, taken with care and respect. But it is the combination of images and the women's own words that makes it impossible to leave untouched.

The exhibition treats its participants as people, not as victims or statistics. And that is a rare quality in that world.

A personal thought from here

I must admit that I have a hard time with people who see migrant sex workers as commodities on a shelf. The exhibition here clearly shows that behind every curtain and every review there is a person with dreams and pain. I would recommend you to go there, regardless of your gender or your attitude. Because we all need to see what is hidden behind the closed curtains along the highway.

The practical:

"You still don't know my name"

GENDER – Museum of the Cultural History of Gender

Cathedral Square 5, Aarhus C

9 October 2025 – 29 August 2026