Denmark

Things to Come takes its title from the 1936 sci-fi film inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come. The project asks whether an image could be powerful enough to alter humanity’s fertility potential – and whether pornography might yet rescue the human species.

Created in dialogue with the design studio Common Accounts, the exhibition features two installations. In the Brummer gallery, a large-scale video work developed in collaboration with the artistic collective DIS unfolds as the most improbable fairytale, featuring the legendary porn star Nicolette Shea as a laboratory scientist in a sperm bank in the year 2045. The film functions as a manifesto for a contemporary naturalism – one that understands mind, visual order, language and social and political culture as emergent from material processes.

In the adjacent gallery, the space is conceived as an eccentric sperm altar, articulated through two elements: cryogenic containers used for preservation and a new fertility ritual — “sperm races”.

The sperm races draw on an online subculture where young men turn concerns about fertility crisis into spectacular events, featuring matches between internet personalities and rival universities.