May 9–November 22, 2026
Venice
Italy
The Danish Arts Foundation announces the appointment of curator Chus Martínez to work with the artist Maja Malou Lyse on the Danish Pavilion at the 61st International Venice Biennale.
The exhibition will explore how different image and value systems—science, fiction, and pornography—collaborate in shaping visions of the future, introducing a grounded, real-world dimension to public discourse through the paradoxical entanglement of fertility science and erotic imagery.
The project will reflect Lyse’s media-conscious practice exploring sexuality, power, and representation in the digital age, alongside Martínez’s curatorial ethos rooted in care, criticality, and dialogue.
Together, Martínez and Lyse have established a dedicated research and working group to develop a new project that expands Lyse’s ongoing inquiry: how the life of images affects the body and reality itself to such an extent that it may bear consequences for us as a species.
The commitment to engage with such a difficult question echoes the wish expressed by the Artistic Director of this Venice Biennale, Koyo Kouoh, whose philosophical framing In Minor Keys calls for art and artists to move beyond moralizing debates and to cultivate an attuned listening to voices systematically excluded from mainstream cultural legitimacy.
Born in 1993, Lyse is the youngest artist to represent Denmark in Venice. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 and has exhibited at, among others, ARoS, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Index Stockholm and O—Overgaden and performed at the National Museum of Denmark, Tate Modern and Moderna Museet. She currently lives in New York.
Martínez’s curatorial praxis centers on care, generosity, and active listening—she positions artworks as spaces for dialogue and learning rather than authority. Martínez believes art enables a new epistemology—a mode of knowing that enables us to feel alternative futures and possible scenarios, reframing how we understand reality. Chus is currently Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Switzerland and serves as Associate Curator at TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) in Madrid and Venice. She also serves as Artistic Director of the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.
To access the press kit, click here.
