Paola Pivi: Come check it out Lies lies lies
April 23–September 13, 2026
PHI presents the exhibitions of artists Jakob Kudsk Steensen and Paola Pivi in the Old Port of Montreal.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Otherworlds
Dive into an immersive exhibition by Jakob Kudsk Steensen that examines contemporary ecological realities through virtual, sonic, and video worlds.
Fieldwork has always been central to Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s practice of virtual world-making. His projects have taken root in sites as varied as the now-collapsed ice cave of Switzerland’s Glacier d’Arolla, Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest, abandoned tourist resorts where flora and fauna resist, the collections of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Bora-Bora, and volcanic seafloors near the Azores.
At first glance, these locations may appear unrelated, yet each functions as a critical vantage point for the artist to witness, digitally archive, and reflect on rapidly evolving ecological realities. After engaging with these spaces and the people who maintain and care for them, Steensen constructs speculative worlds in which scientific observation and imaginative retelling unfold together. Avoiding the pitfalls of overt moralism or defeatism and eschewing a straightforward documentary approach, he instead points towards unaddressed, unrevealed, or unspoken narratives surrounding climate change—how it alters our bodies and our minds, plays with our memories, and restructures our collective unconscious.
For Otherworlds, Steensen proposes a new modality of his field research: this Montréal presentation invites the artist and his studio to delve into their own archive, treating past projects as terrain in their own right. The exhibition rearticulates six of Steensen’s worlds created over the last decade, inviting visitors to encounter them as chapters within a larger narrative: virtual reality experiences, spatialized sound environments and immersive video installations become corners of a world, fragments of a dream, cadences of a musical piece, stanzas of a poem, levels of an unfolding video game.
Otherworlds is Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s first solo exhibition in Canada, and marks the largest institutional presentation of his work to date. The exhibition includes the North American premiere of his large-scale installation Psychosphere (2025), originally commissioned by Copenhagen’s Cisternerne.
Curator: Daniel Fiset
Paola Pivi: Come check it out. Lies lies lies
Discover Paola Pivi’s first major exhibition in Québec, as well as her first touring exhibition in Canada, originally produced by Contemporary Calgary.
Paola Pivi’s art is about possibilities and potentialities. It’s about freedom and truth. Born in Milan, Italy, and currently spending time in Toronto, Canada, Paola Pivi subverts the familiar and ordinary in ways that expand on our relationship with the built environment. Her work is born from deep observations and imaginings, unravelling worlds that seem curious and magical but that are actually rooted in the realities of our time.
Come check it out. Lies lies lies marks Paola Pivi’s first major touring exhibition in Canada. The exhibition features sculptural installations that question the authenticity of iconic symbols, such as the Statue of Liberty and the polar bear, which have come to stand in for ideas of freedom and climate change. Central to the exhibition is an immersive work titled Lies (2018) that asks viewers to consider the unstable terrain of truth and falsehood, real and fabricated news.
Staged as theatrical assemblages, much of Pivi’s work employs the power of association to unpack and demystify the contrived relationship between the natural and fabricated worlds. In doing so, it invites us to reflect on our choices, and the inherent responsibility they carry. Her work seeks the truthful and factual in ways that peel back layers of misinformation and stereotypes, but with a sense of irony and playfulness that allows for wider engagement and deeper introspection.
Curator: Kanika Anand, Contemporary Calgary
