Emotional Terrains of Change at Simian, Copenhagen

How do we navigate a world that appears to be transforming faster than we can grasp – without our agency and consent? Emotional Terrains of Change brings together six artistic positions to examine the emotional dimensions of accelerated change and its effects on the shifting inner and outer landscapes we inhabit.

We find ourselves in the midst of far-reaching upheaval: climate crises, geopolitical ruptures, democratic erosion, and the breakdown of structures once taken for granted. The promise of progress, prosperity, and peace that once defined post-war democracies has become difficult to sustain. Even traditional conservative forces, once considered protectors of continuity, now act as drivers of instability and disruption.

The exhibition – a hybrid that moves between solo and group show – draws its conceptual momentum from two literary works that explore, in distinct ways, the relationship between transformation, temporality and emotional resilience. In The Long Journey (1908–1922), a sweeping six-volume epic tracing humanity’s evolution from early hominids to Columbus, Danish Nobel laureate Johannes V. Jensen describes the rock formations of Kullen (today Sweden) as seemingly eternal to the people living on the opposite coast (today Denmark). However, this perception is revealed to be an illusion: what appears fixed, has in fact been sculpted by time – through tectonic, climatic, and biological forces. For Jensen, change is not opposed to reality but constitutes its very core.

A more radical reading emerges in Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower (1993), which plays thirty years in the future, that is now. In a violent society on the brink of climatic and democratic collapse, Butler’s protagonist confronts a central truth: “God is Change.” Here, change is not only inevitable but absolute – a primal force that evokes both awe and fear. Butler’s narrative captures the fragility of humanity, the strength of community and agency in the midst of systemic collapse.

These two trajectories – Jensen’s evolutionary review and Butler’s transformationist prophecy – form conceptual pillars within the exhibition. They challenge us not to recoil from change, but to face it emotionally, with reflection and initiative. The large-scale contributions of the invited artists address themes of transformation spanning habitats, psyche, biology, and democracy. These works engage in a dialogue that sparks reflection on issues such as the role of medicine and technology amid shifting political landscapes (including autocratic regimes), or the psychological impact of altered habitats and social dynamics brought about by climate change:

Rafik Greiss takes the urban history of the city district Ørestad as his point of departure. Developed with a top-down logic of combining corporate and private real estate, Ørestad was constructed over former wetlands using glass, steel, and concrete – with little regard for nature, social realities, or historical context. Today, parts of Ørestad resemble a ghost town: oversized, under-inhabited, alienating. In his installation, Greiss engages this architectural emptiness by applying artificial patina, collapsing temporal boundaries between past, present, and imagined futures – and reflecting on the cycles of deconstruction and reconstruction of urban landscapes.

Rindon Johnson turns his attention to a symbol of democratic representation: the Capitol in Washington, D.C. In an AI-assisted live-stream video work, the riots on January 6th 2021 is rendered from a distance, its actors appearing almost like streams of ants. Meanwhile this detached perspective belies the profound fracture it signifies: a society driven by polarisation, where democratic institutions are disregarded or eroded. Johnson transforms this moment into a symbol of technologically amplified rupture (by algorithmic manipulation) – a real, but digitally intensified, assault on democracy’s foundations. His hand-crafted glass ceiling pieces, produced in Ukraine, enter into dialogue with the video by echoing the patterns of brain cancer cells. In doing so, Johnson opens up a discussion on the physical and psychological weakening of systems, and raises questions about interruption, containment, and the possibility of healing.

Pakui Hardware investigate the porous boundary between body, technology, and media culture in their installation The Host. Their glass sculptures evoke operating theatres, where exposed bodies lie ready for intervention – potentially transformed into cyborg-like entities through medical science. These bodies are mutable, transparent, but (psychologically) highly vulnerable. The title The Host evokes multiple associations: the body as vessel, as interface, as site of infiltration and healing. The work probes tensions between autonomy and submission, between hyper-technological control and care.

Leda Bourgogne also foregrounds the body – positioned between sensory perception, resistance, and psychoanalytic depth. Her installation and paintings draw attention to the prefrontal cortex – the brain region that converts sensory input into decision-making. Latex-coated canvases stretch through the exhibition space like membranes: reactive, elastic, exposed. Latex – a material that snaps back into shape after deformation – becomes a metaphor for resilience, a recurring motif in Bourgogne’s inquiry into the overstimulated subject, sensitivity and empowerment.

Amitai Romm and Bjarke Hvass Kure explore imaginaries of future landscapes. Their vacuum installation preserves Danish plant specimens from a wild fallow field alongside sorghum – a non-native yet resilient cereal that thrives in heat, drought, and intense light. The plants have been part of an artistic experiment in a climate simulation facility that controls temperature, CO₂, humidity, and light. Here they were exposed to scenarios ranging from the onset of a new ice age to prolonged heatwaves. In this way, the plants become witnesses to a speculative and accelerated play with the climatic parameters of reality. Now enclosed without air, they are preserved as images, stopped in time. In the rear of the exhibition, ceiling sculptures by Romm continue the theme, using lamps from a climate simulator in a series of parabolic forms designed to transmit and receive information.

Emotional Terrains of Change brings these diverse artistic perspectives into critical dialogue, assembling a fragmented but resonant portrait of the present – one marked by transformation and uncertainty to discover individual and collective strength. Embracing current change as a given, the exhibition takes the opportunity to rethink how we relate to the world, to our bodies, to technologies, and to each other – in pursuit of emotional integrity and a more humanistic future.

–Fabian Flückiger