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# Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Otherworlds closes Sunday at PHI
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jakob-kudsk-steensens-otherworlds-closes-sunday-at-phi/
- Published: 2026-09-11T19:22:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T19:22:16.000Z
- Description: Six ecological worlds from a decade of fieldwork, hung as chapters of one unfolding video game — the artist’s largest institutional show yet.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Installation, exhibition, Montreal, Game Engines, vr, ecology, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, PHI Centre

You have until Sunday. *Otherworlds*, Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s first solo exhibition in Canada and the largest institutional showing of the Danish artist’s work to date, closes September 13 at [PHI in Old Montréal](https://phi.ca/en/events/jakob-kudsk-steensen-otherworlds/?ref=killscreen.com)—six worlds built across a decade, including the North American premiere of *Psychosphere* (2025), the deep-sea installation originally commissioned by Copenhagen’s Cisternerne.

**Psychosphere* at Cisternerne, via The Frederiksberg Museums—the installation now making its North American premiere in **Otherworlds*.

The organizing conceit is that Steensen’s own archive has become the fieldwork site. This is an artist whose worlds usually begin in punishing physical research—a now-collapsed ice cave in the Swiss Alps for *Tongues of Verglas*, the 1987 mating call of the extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō for *RE-ANIMATED*, simulated global warming in Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest for *Boreal Dreams*, Bora-Bora’s colonial tourist imaginary for *Primal Tourism*. Here the six works hang together, in curator Daniel Fiset’s words, as “cadences in a musical score, stanzas in a poem, intersecting terrains, levels in a video game.”

Fiset’s exhibition text makes the argument outright: the opposition between contemporary art and video games “has become increasingly flawed,” and games offer artists “a way to reflect on rule-based systems, chance, immersion, and the digitization of culture.” It is the thesis Killscreen has been following through Steensen’s work since [a digital swamp in 2021](https://www.killscreen.com/dreaming-up-a-digital-swamp/), through [our talk with the artist this April](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/), and in [May’s feature on the places we’re losing](https://www.killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/).

PHI announced the closing stretch with [a recorded curator conversation](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYzhyRHD84H/?ref=killscreen.com) on how the worlds get built from field research and 3D capture. If you go—budget about 90 minutes—the show ends in *Psychosphere*’s chapel-like dark, where Fiset’s text lands its quietest point: immersion did not start with digital culture, and the traditions that sought to carry people past ordinary perception are far older than the game engine.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v1.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v4.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v5.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v2.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v6.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v7.jpg)

Installation views, **Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Otherworlds*, 2026, PHI: **Primal Tourism*, **Tongues of Verglas*, and **Psychosphere*. © PHI, photos: document original.

We have been following Steensen’s worlds since 2021, and the next artist building landscapes inside a game engine is already in our notebook. The newsletter is free.

[Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta)