Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Otherworlds

Fieldwork has always been central to Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen's practice of virtual world-making. His projects have taken root in sites as varied as the now-collapsed ice cave of Switzerland's Glacier d'Arolla, Minnesota's Marcell Experimental Forest, abandoned tourist resorts where flora and fauna resist, the collections of New York's American Museum of Natural History, Bora-Bora, and volcanic seafloors near the Azores. At first glance, these locations may appear unrelated, yet each functions as a critical vantage point for the artist to witness, digitally archive, and reflect on rapidly evolving ecological realities. After engaging with these spaces and the people who maintain and care for them, Steensen constructs speculative worlds in which scientific observation and imaginative retelling unfold together. Avoiding the pitfalls of overt moralism or defeatism and eschewing a straightforward documentary approach, he instead points towards unaddressed, unrevealed, or unspoken narratives surrounding climate change—how it alters our bodies and our minds, plays with our memories, and restructures our collective unconscious. For Otherworlds, Steensen proposes a new modality of his field research: this Montréal presentation invites the artist and his studio to delve into their own archive, treating past projects as terrain in their own right. The exhibition rearticulates six of Steensen's worlds created over the last decade, inviting visitors to encounter them as chapters within a larger narrative: virtual reality experiences, spatialized sound environments and immersive video installations become corners of a world, fragments of a dream, cadences of a musical piece, stanzas of a poem, levels of an unfolding video game. Otherworlds is Jakob Kudsk Steensen's first solo exhibition in Canada, and marks the largest institutional presentation of his work to date. The exhibition includes the North American premiere of his large-scale installation Psychosphere (2025), originally commissioned by Copenhagen's Cisternerne. Curator: Daniel Fiset