Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Other Worlds

Fieldwork has always been at the heart of Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s practice of creating virtual worlds. His projects have taken root in sites as varied as the now-collapsed ice cave of the Arolla Glacier in Switzerland, the Marcell Experimental Forest in Minnesota, abandoned tourist resorts where flora and fauna persist, the collections of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Bora Bora, and volcanic seabeds near the Azores.At first glance, these places may seem unrelated, but each serves as a crucial vantage point from which the artist can document, digitally archive, and reflect on rapidly changing ecological realities. After immersing himself in these spaces and meeting the people who maintain and care for them, Steensen constructs speculative worlds where scientific observation and imaginative rewriting unfold side by side. Avoiding the pitfalls of heavy-handed moralizing or paralyzing defeatism, and turning away from a direct documentary approach, he instead brings to light untold, unrevealed, or silenced narratives surrounding climate change—the way it transforms our bodies and minds, plays with our memories, and reconfigures our collective unconscious.For *Other Worlds*, Steensen proposes a new approach to his fieldwork: this Montreal presentation invites the artist and his studio to explore their own archives, treating past projects as territories in their own right. The exhibition rearticulates six of the worlds created by Steensen over the past decade, inviting visitors to discover them as chapters of a broader narrative: virtual reality experiences, spatialized sound environments, and immersive video installations become corners of a world, fragments of a dream, the cadences of a musical composition, stanzas of a poem, or levels of an ever-evolving video game.“Other Worlds” is Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s first solo exhibition in Canada and represents the most significant institutional presentation of his work to date. The exhibition includes the North American premiere of his large-scale installation *Psychosphere*, originally commissioned by Cisternerne in Copenhagen.