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What would you do with 20 liters of sperm? That was the challenge put to Danish artist Maja Malou Lyse when the CEO of a sperm bank approached her with a sticky proposition. “He wanted to give 20 liters of sperm to an artist to interpret,” Lyse explained. “I thought, this is probably the weirdest request I’ll ever get, so I might as well roll with it.” Lyse didn’t end up using the fluids — the CEO got tired of waiting and made his own massive glass egg instead — but her visit to the clinic’s headquarters provided an alternate source of inspiration, forming the catalyst for Things to Come, her exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale where she stands as the youngest artist ever to represent Denmark.
Merging the hyper-clinical world of reproductive science with the well-oiled machine of mainstream porn, Lyse’s multi-screen ‘bimbo sci-fi’ reflects the duality she encountered on her sperm bank research trip. “There was this dirty little wanker room with a leather couch and a big screen defaulted to Pornhub, then next door was the laboratory, which felt so sci-fi with its big tanks and lab workers in their white suits with gloves and glasses.” It was there that she discovered a surprising scientific study linking virtual porn consumption to an up to 50% increase in sperm motility. That an immersive erotic experience could have such a significant, physical effect on the body inspired her to explore the power of the image not just as an imaginative and ideological tool, but a biological one with the power to alter humanity’s fertility potential. “When I got to Venice, I thought, you know what? Maybe this is my way of representing my country.” Not only is Denmark a top destination for donor sperm, Lyse tells me from the floor of her rented Venetian palazzo, it was also the first country to legalize the pornographic image back in 1969. “Like, at least I’m bringing some Danish culture into the pavilion.”
Inside the exhibition, large-scale screens surround viewers, mimicking the form of a VR headset and placing them within a futuristic laboratory run by porn stars who Lyse recruited at the AVN Awards in Las Vegas. “It was so important for me to work with real porn actresses because I really see them as experts in image making. They’re so highly skilled in camera logic, in performance, in audience awareness,” Lyse explained. Starring Nicollette Shea, Kira Noir, Abigail Morris and Kayley Gunner, the film cycles through vivid, surreal scenes where science, fiction and porn intersect as entangled image systems. It’s within this economy of images that Lyse’s work feels most at home. “There are so many iconic images in art history that tell us something about the time and place of society, but I think that we really lack that way of perceiving pop cultural, pornographic or mass media images.”
The adult industry has driven the development of the internet as we know it, underpinning everything from online payment systems and video streaming algorithms to data privacy infrastructure. Dismissing it ignores its foundational — and highly influential — role in our digital economy. As Lyse rightly observes, “the Venice Biennale is the most visited exhibition in the world, with one million visitors over seven months, but you know, that’s what Pornhub gets in ten or fifteen minutes.” These mass consumed images dictate how gender, power, and desire are understood and acted-out within a culture. They shape our preferences, how we think about sex and sexuality. “The difference between sex and sexy is like worlds apart,” Lyse adds, flicking her platinum blonde pony tail from her shoulder. “Sex is so awkward — it’s sweaty armpits and like hairy legs and like awkward laughs, but sexy is the opposite. Sexy is highly stylized, it’s a perfect facade. It’s clean. It’s everything that sex isn’t. I think that distinction is really interesting.”
Lyse points to Playboy as a prime example of a sexual institution that shaped modern culture. “It was a big part of the late ‘60s and ‘70s sexual freedom movement, an institution that you could praise and critique all at once.” she says. “In some of the old issues, on the first page, it says explicitly ‘this is for men only.’ It really puts it into words; this is by men for men. We’re now seeing how this sexual institution has been trying to adapt, introducing female voices.” The friction of that legacy is written directly onto Lyse’s own history. “I got a Playboy tattoo on my butt when I was 20 years old, and now I hate having tattoos so I decided to get them removed. I ended up filming one of the sessions, and I think this image of a tattoo removal became very symbolic of how difficult it is to change things that are so immersed into our bodies and our souls, our surrounding culture.”
If there’s one thing that unites Lyse’s work, it’s the ability to sit with ambivalence. “The worst thing that could happen was that the work became a discussion over if porn was good or bad. To me, that’s such a boring question. I can read an Andrea Dworkin book — the queen of sex-negativity — and I’m like, oh my god, you’re so right,” Lyse admits. “But at the same time, I can be working with porn stars and I’m like, oh my god, you are the most inspirational people. You’re so cool. You’re so smart profiting off of the patriarchy. I have always related to both arguments. Being a woman is like the most empowering and disempowering thing, you know?”
By inserting the figure of the bimbo into the historic, high-minded setting of Venice, Lyse challenges the authority of fine art. “I love the word bimbo, the figure of the bimbo,” she says. “I don’t think there has been a bimbo in art since Cicciolina in Jeff Koons’ work.” But the bimbo wasn’t the only contemporary archetype to inspire Things to Come, and Lyse researched the figure of the Gooner, finding the film’s structure by studying their hyper-accelerated viewing habits. “Our attention span is so TikTokified. In MVP (music video porn), they compile ‘the moment’ from about 50 different pornos. Everything that bores you or distracts you is cut out. So it’s climax, climax, climax — so fast-paced that they enter this transcendental state.”
Against a backdrop of declining male fertility rates, and a decline in real-world intimacy, the exhibition rubs up against very real contemporary anxieties, but Lyse is careful to frame technology not just as the culprit. “Poor diet, stress, hot phones in our pockets, or hot computers on our laps — human-made society is breaking down biology,” she says. “But that same technology can also act as the antidote.”
This synthesis of biology and technology arrives just as the human element of an image-making confronts its own existential crisis in the face of AI. “The image used to be the truth-teller and now it’s changed forever. Soon humans might not even create images anymore. No more image labour, no more porn. Making this felt like a last little hurrah, coming together and creating images.” In one scene, Lyse inserts herself into the film as a puppet master, physically hoisting the breasts of one of the performers. By revealing the machinery of desire, she lays bare not only the complex choreography behind our fantasies, but everything we stand to lose when we’re not the ones pulling the strings.