Holstebro, DK—Holstebro Kunstmuseum presents Mælkeøje (Milk Eye), a solo exhibition by Uffe Isolotto (b. 1976, Copenhagen), marking his first newly commissioned project since representing Denmark at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Spanning the entirety of the museum’s Færch Wing, Isolotto’s immersive installation transforms the galleries into the headquarters of a mysterious, otherworldly cult.
This fictional world draws from the aesthetics of 1970s communes, retro-futuristic technology, and hybrid systems of observation—sliding between mystical voyeurism and authoritarian surveillance. Integrated seamlessly into the museum’s architecture, each gallery becomes a stage for the unfolding narrative of a recruitment center, moving through reeducation spaces, conditioning rooms, and living quarters. Placed in media res, visitors are pulled into the traces of a fractured retrotopia—a future imagined in the past.
Through a sensory blend of sculpture, scenography, scent, and sound, Mælkeøje envisions a fictional organization devoted to ritualistic acts of linguistic disassembly. Language, both a tool of unity and control, is explored as a device of poetic resistance and ideological tension. Lingering in the undefined spaces of signification, the lapses of concrete meaning shared among the communication tactics of cults and political movements, Isolotto examines the power of symbols, signs, and metaphor within today’s cultural landscape.
At the heart of the installation sits a heuristic sculpture of an adolescent girl—part avatar, part altar. Her cascading copper-red hair frames a face turned upward; her eyes clouded by an unreadable expression. Her presence portrays a vessel of prophetic uncertainty: a conduit through which alternative pasts and speculative futures converge.
About / Biographies
Uffe Isolotto (b. 1976, Copenhagen, DK) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. His works interrogate how the changing technological reality we live in can be understood through composite bodies. Spanning sculpture, installation, and time-based media, his works challenge the established distinctions between the human and the non-human. He has participated in solo exhibitions at Arken, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Nikolaj Kunsthal, and Malmö Konsthall, among others. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Denmark and Holstebro Art Museum. In 2022, Isolotto presented We Walked the Earth, curated by Jacob Lillemose for the Danish Pavilion, as part of the 59th Venice Biennale The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Across curatorial projects and productions, Isolotto’s work has traversed different ecologies—both biological and synthetic—through an embodied practice that encompasses technology and ecologies in the broadest sense.
Stephanie Cristello (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) is a contemporary art critic, independent curator, and author based in Chicago, IL. She was previously the Senior Editor US for ArtSlant (2012–2018) and founding Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art. Her writing has been published in ArtReview, BOMB Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Mousse Magazine, OSMOS, and Portable Gray, where she was named Editor-at-Large in 2024, in addition to numerous exhibition catalogues nationally and internationally. She served as the Artistic Director of EXPO CHICAGO (2013–2020) and is currently the Director / Curator at Chicago Manual Style (Chicago), a non-profit space for exhibition and publishing. From 2020–21 she was a Curatorial Advisor to the 2020 Busan Biennale (South Korea) as well as a Guest Curator at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark) and the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden); her recent exhibitions from 2022–24 at the Driehaus Museum (Chicago) and The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry (Chicago) were covered in The New York Times among other outlets. From 2015–17 she was part of the team for the first Hors les Murs satellite exhibition of the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in the United States. She is the author of Theodora Allen: Saturnine (Motto / Kunsthal Aarhus, 2021), Sustainable Societies for the Future (Motto / Malmö Art Museum, 2021), and Barbara Kasten: Architecture and Film 2015–2020 (Skira, 2022). In 2020, she was awarded a publication grant by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
