COPENHAGEN.- Simian announces two solo exhibitions by Cyprien Gaillard and Lea Porsager, both presented in collaboration with Yonder, Art•Science, at the Niels Bohr Institute.
While distinct in form and methodology, both exhibitions trace how landscapes and objects carry the accumulated marks of intervention, extraction and collapse.
Désespoir des Singes is the first major exhibition in Denmark by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. It brings together a large, newly composed, selection of Polaroids photographed between 2006 and 2012, depicting buildings, monuments, ruins, parks, and landscapes at sites marked by ambition, transformation and decay. The images are presented on specially designed displays, suspended from the space’s numerous pillars and held in curved formations by piano wire and clavichord tuning pegs. Arranged in groupings of nine, like crystallized facets, they connect places and moments across time and geography.
The exhibition borrows its title from Araucaria araucana, a tree whose French name translates as “monkeys’ despair”. Taxonomic signs once attached to the same tree species, removed by the artist from various French botanical gardens, are installed in the exhibition using their original mountings. A corridor built into the exhibition space houses a bronze sculpture of a seated, weeping figure. Recurring in Gaillard’s practice, it depicts the Buddha in a moment of despair – a motif widely circulated in Indonesia as both craft object and tourist souvenir. Furthering these questions of purpose and circulation, a series of sculptures is composed of different tropical timber, small blocks designated by size and shape as blanks for the production of knives and pens.
Together, the works tie in with the artist’s ongoing investigation into the entanglement of nature and culture, creation and destruction, as well as the shifting relationships between past and present. They trace how human movement and civilization leave material and visual residues across landscapes and objects.
Lea Porsager’s exhibition …and snEEzE unfolds as a speculative environment of optical diffractions, polarized ice cores, and repellent materials. Drawing on quantum physics, tantric technologies, and feminist thought, the works inhabit different collapsing time-scales: glacial time, space-time, and psychic time.
At the core of the exhibition is a parody of Goethe’s Faust, staged in Copenhagen in 1932 during the formative years of the Niels Bohr Institute. In the play, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli appeared as the trickster Mephistopheles. In the exhibition, an archival caricature from the play, punctured with two holes, allows visitors to peer into a cold, enclosed chamber. Inside, a film work of a polarized ice core appears. Unfolding over exactly 85 seconds, the work references the so-called Doomsday Clock, which in 2026 stands at 85 seconds to midnight, symbolizing the closest humanity has come to a human-made global catastrophe.
Shaped by Simian’s subterranean architecture, …and snEEzE takes the gallery’s cold, bunker-like atmosphere as its point of departure. Throughout the exhibition, references to theoretical physics appear displaced and transformed, generating an atmosphere where scientific imaginaries and psychic states collapse into one another. Developed through research at the Niels Bohr Institute’s ice-core archive, the exhibition brings together polarized ice, vacant beds, chakra mills, and untethered thought-forms. Scientific material transmutes into an anarchic wasteland reigned by fractured time, dulled senses and catatonic anxiety.
Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980 in Paris) lives in Paris and Berlin. His work has been shown in exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2025—2026, OGR Torino in 2024—2025, the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, in 2024, the Palais de Tokyo & Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, and LUMA Arles, both in 2022, the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, in 2015, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, in 2015, MoMA PS1, New York, in 2013, the Kunsthalle Basel in 2010, MMK Frankfurt in 2010, the New Museum, New York, and Tate Modern, London, both in 2009. In 2010 Gaillard was the recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2011 he was awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, Berlin.
Lea Porsager (1981) holds a PhD from Malmö Art Academy/Lunds University (2021), followed by Mads Øvlisen Postdoc Fellowship (2023-25). Her exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Henie Onstad, Oslo; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; and the 14th Istanbul Biennial. She was awarded the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Scholarship in 2014. Her large-scale earthwork and memorial Gravitational Ripples was inaugurated in Stockholm in 2018.
