EXHIBITION

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Otherworlds is Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s first major solo exhibition in Canada and the largest institutional presentation of his work to date. Bringing together six major works spanning a decade of his production, the exhibition offers the artist an opportunity to revisit his archive and survey the worlds he has imagined. Unfolding across two of PHI’s buildings, it presents virtual experiences, spatialized sound environments, and immersive video installations that appear less as discrete works than as fragments of a larger composition—cadences in a musical score, stanzas in a poem, intersecting terrains, levels in a video game.

This gathering, where past work reappears as terrain to be further explored, resonates with Kudsk Steensen’s creative process, which begins with intensive periods of ecological research and creative collaboration. In glacial caves, experimental forests, natural history museum vaults, volcanic seabeds, and abandoned tourist resorts, he gathers data that later becomes foundational to the immersive digital worlds he constructs. These datasets, however, are not presented as straightforward documents of disappearing or otherwise inaccessible environments. Rather, they serve as points of departure for speculative constructions, indebted as much to the imagination as to the sensations, memories, and mental states that move through the artist during his research—and that, in turn, traverse the visitor’s own experience of the works.

That speculation lies at the core of Kudsk Steensen’s practice may seem counterintuitive, given how deeply his work is grounded in observational research. Tongues of Verglas (2022–23), an immersive video installation presented in G1, exemplifies this tension. The artist made repeated visits to a now-collapsed ice cave within the Glacier d’Arolla in the Swiss Alps—first while it was still standing, and again a year after its collapse—recording the memories of a glaciologist and a mountaineer familiar with its terrain. Glaciers, despite their seemingly immutable appearance, host complex ecologies and bear witness to the accelerating climate crisis; the “tongue” referenced in the work’s title, for example, describes a phenomenon in which a portion of a glacier juts out above the water’s edge due to rapid temperature changes. Scans of the Arolla glacier’s textures and of its resident flora form the basis of a poetic meditation that draws parallels between human bonds and those emerging within natural environments: the ice cave as a site of encounter, where language itself can be reconfigured.

G2 hosts RE-ANIMATED (2018-19), a VR and video experience based on a recording of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a Hawaiian bird species that was declared officially extinct in 1987. A decade earlier, researchers captured the mating call of its last known male. Kudsk Steensen encountered this recording on YouTube at the outset of his research, which led him to the collections of the American Museum of Natural History—where stuffed specimens collected in the nineteenth century are held—and to a meeting with ornithologist H. Douglas Pratt, one of the last researchers to see the bird prior to its disappearance. That this reverie originates in an online encounter with dematerialized sound waves is not incidental: the digital archive here becomes both a site of mourning and one of regenerative potential.

In G3, Boreal Dreams (2025) draws on scientific research conducted in Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest, where scientists simulated conditions of global warming to study their effects on ecosystems. Sensitive to the Boreal forest’s critical role in regulating the Earth’s weather systems, as well as its key role in carbon storage, Kudsk Steensen imagines a future in which incremental temperature increase impacts the way that natural cycles rest, sleep, think, and dream. Environmental data gathered whilst the artist was on-site is transformed into sensory landscapes introducing speculative futures that see the forest shift and change. The work can be experienced either as a two-channel video installation, or as an interactive online experience that affords visitors greater agency over the simulations.

Alongside the interactive elements of Boreal Dreams, Primal Tourism (2016), presented in G4, most explicitly explores gaming interfaces and interactivity. Visitors wander across the island of Bora Bora—not through its idyllic image shaped by global tourism, but through an imagined, dystopian register. The work overlays existing cartographies with projected fantasies of exoticism, tracing how colonial imaginaries and contemporary leisure economies script, consume, and reshape territory, and pointing to their enduring effects. Cartography of Fantasia (2015) extends this interrogation of projection and desire through abandoned tourist resorts in Spain. Like Primal Tourism, it is inspired by the decline of spaces once conceived as sites of pure escape. Through Kudsk Steensen’s process, these environments become repositories of aspiration and disillusion, revealing the afterlives of exploitative fantasies on the lands that host them.

The exhibition culminates at 465 Saint-Jean Street with Psychosphere (2025), a large-scale installation that unites spatialized sound, interactive light sculptures evoking hybrid species, and video imagery stemming from Kudsk Steensen’s travels to geothermal vents across the Azores and Stromboli, as well as deep sea volcanic footage carried out in collaboration with REV Ocean/REV Aurora. Organic and synthetic, historical and speculative elements converge here to suggest a mutable ecology, in perpetual adaptation. Like in Kudsk Steensen’s past works, a generative and directional soundscape turns the space into an instrument in itself, as if animated by breath. While the artist’s works often draw on dream states, Psychosphere also suggests a total environment not unlike a chapel or sacred space—a reminder that immersion is not the sole preserve of digital culture, but emerges from far older spiritual traditions that have long sought to transport humans beyond the limits of ordinary perception.

Otherworlds situates Kudsk Steensen’s practice alongside other forms of world-building, most notably video games, which have been a constant point of reference for the artist. At first glance, contemporary art and video games might seem to occupy opposite ends of the cultural spectrum: one historically shaped by exclusivity and distinction, the other by mass accessibility. Yet this opposition has become increasingly flawed, as digital ecologies flatten distinctions between high and low culture and as artists move fluidly across categories. Games have long informed artistic practice, appearing throughout art history both as subject matter and as method. Video games, in particular, offer artists a way to reflect on rule-based systems, chance, immersion, and the digitization of culture. They model a structural logic that privileges circulation over passive viewing, perpetual repositioning within space, and the capacity to shift perspectives, to adopt ever-changing vantage points. Kudsk Steensen’s environments, in granting us a heightened sense of agency, invite us then not only to observe our world(s), but to navigate, reconsider, and reimagine them.

Text: Daniel Fiset

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