Danish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2026: Who Brought Porn Stars into the Exhibition?

Maja Malou Lyse: “I bring together worlds that do not usually meet”

At the 2026 Venice Biennale, the Danish Pavilion has entrusted Maja Malou Lyse with a project that intertwines pornography, biotechnology, and image politics. With Things to Come, the artist brings to the Giardini a work that places desire, spectacle, science, and national representation into friction.

Link to the Italian version on Artribune
At the 2026 Venice Biennale, the Danish Pavilion presents Things to Come, Maja Malou Lyse’s project curated by Chus Martínez. It is a work that enters a very specific zone of the present, where pornography, biotechnology, desire, and visual culture no longer function as separate territories, but as parts of the same system of image production. In Venice, this line of research takes on a more exposed form: a large video installation developed with DIS, materials from Cryos, the world’s largest sperm bank, performers from the porn industry, and an intervention that incorporates the pavilion’s architecture. Not so much a provocation, then, as a device of friction between different regimes of visibility. We spoke with the artist about it.

Interview with Maja Malou Lyse, the Artist of the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2026

The title of the Danish Pavilion, Things to Come, suggests anticipation, projection, perhaps even unease. What does it mean within your practice?

Last summer I had a small obsession with old science fiction films and novels. I was interested in the way culture uses moving images to represent what it does not know. There is something very human in turning the fear of the unknown into aesthetics: it helps us process it. When I came across Things to Come, a film from the 1930s, I immediately understood that it was the right title. My project also looks at a suspended moment, at a world that is breaking apart and being reassembled through technology. There is that idea of something open, not yet fully defined. But there is also a rather obvious double meaning, and I liked that very much. Considering that the work includes porn performers and semen coming from a sperm bank, it felt perfect.

Desire, self-representation, digital culture, bodies, and the politics of visibility often return in your work. What changes when these themes enter the space of a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale?

So far I have mainly worked with image-based platforms and outside more traditional exhibition spaces: television, newspapers, magazines, festivals. Venice is one of my first major solo presentations within an art institution. At first I imagined something more dispersed, closer to media, then I decided to really work with the format of the pavilion.
An important aspect concerns the performers in the film, who are famous porn stars. The Venice Biennale receives around one million visitors over seven months. That is more or less what Pornhub receives in twelve and a half minutes. For me, those performers carry with them a history of the body and of image politics that I keep returning to in my work. Many artists have used pornographic images, but it is less common to work directly with the performers and with the infrastructure of that industry. At the same time, I was working with Cryos and with their scientists. This is exactly what interests me: art as a space where different worlds can meet and collide.

Could you describe more concretely the project you are presenting in Venice?

The presentation consists of two main works. The first is a large three-channel video installation developed together with DIS. The film was shot partly inside Cryos, the world’s largest sperm bank, which is also based in my hometown, Aarhus, and partly in a special effects studio in New York. We worked with a cast of well-known performers from the porn industry. The film holds together a clinical dimension and a more constructed, almost cinematic one, blending scientific environments and fantasy.
The second work is more sculptural. It is made up of nitrogen transport containers from Cryos, the kind used to preserve and ship semen. Inside there is donated semen that was discarded because of low motility, so semen considered unsuccessful. The containers also include small LED screens showing material from Sperm Racing, a new sport linked to the manosphere.

The Danish Pavilion in the Giardini carries a strong historical and symbolic weight. How did you approach that architecture?

I have to admit that I had never entered the Danish Pavilion before receiving the invitation. During the first site visit, I felt very intimidated. I genuinely thought: what am I doing here? I have relatively little experience with works conceived for physical space, so it was an important confrontation for me.
At the time I was working from my studio in Times Square, with all those billboards in front of me. The installation was influenced by that relationship between screens and architecture. I worked very closely with Common Accounts, and together we developed works integrated into the pavilion. I did not want to use the building as a backdrop, but as an active part of the project.

Chus Martínez is curating the pavilion. In what way did your dialogue shape the project?

When I was appointed by the Danish Arts Foundation, I was given a clear condition: to choose an international curator. Working with her was important. She brings experience and rigor, and she made the project more precise. She is also very good at grounding me when I begin to lose myself. We come from different generations and do not always think in the same way, but that very difference was productive. The same goes for DIS and for Common Accounts: it is truly a shared effort.

The Biennale often intensifies the tension between artistic complexity and public visibility. How do you think the pavilion will hold together intimacy, spectacle, and critique?

It is a very real tension. On the one hand, you want to bring to Venice the most ambitious and complex work you have made so far. On the other, you know you are confronting a tired, overloaded audience, bombarded with images. It has always been important to me that the work could speak outside the art system as well. In that sense, Venice is the right place. I do not know whether everyone will like it, but I do know that no one will be bored.
In Maja Malou Lyse’s project, the point is not provocation in itself, a category that by now is too weak to explain works that truly operate on the infrastructures of the image. The point is rather the friction between different systems of visibility: that of porn, that of science, that of contemporary art, and that of national representation. Things to Come seems to emerge precisely there, in that zone where the future no longer appears as a clear promise, but as a field already saturated with desire, control, reproduction, and spectacle.

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