The Emperor of Antarctica
Born in Denmark, growing up in Hans Christian Andersens hometown of Odense, Zander dropped out of high school in 98 to accept a job offer from a local advertising agency. He was soon after headhunted to the Copenhagen B2C office of Framfab (today LBi) where he found himself working exclusively on Nike’s international football endeavors at the ripe old age of 17. The work for Nike resulted in the first Cannes D’Or Grand Prix given to Denmark since 1961. From there he ventured into the realms of PR to work for ‘Sigma’ who was catering Lego exclusively at this point. Overdosing soon after on a massive dose of ‘Public Relations’, Zander decided to open up his own shop alongside two close friends – an undertaking which became ‘Bottega Areté’ an experimental design group and artist collective opened in 2002.
Bottega Areté worked across a plethora of fields, but became famous mostly as pioneers on the emerging digitally driven VJ scene in Scandinavia in the early 00s. The work brought them around much of the globe, among the locations was an exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in (MNAC) in Bucharest Romania in 2004, which led to Zander making the unexpected choice of relocating to Romania in 2006. At first for a few months to work on some projects with friends he met while exhibiting there. It ended up becoming a two year stay the first time around working on local clients and still cooperating on danish clients with the Bottega crew. He returned to Denmark in 2008 to start up his own solo practice as ‘the Emperor of Antarctica’ – focussing mainly on graphics for music, ending up as the Art Director of Denmark’s best known House & Techno label ‘Tartelet Records’, working extensively on the design of Copenhagen luxury hotel apartments ‘Stay Copenhagen’ and for the last year and a half as the lead Art Director for the danish headphone brand AIAIAI, a job which he currently handles ‘at large’ as last month he moved back to Bucharest to pursue working on his own artworks.