Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Otherworlds closes Sunday at PHI

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—six worlds built across a decade, including the North American premiere of Psychosphere (2025), the deep-sea installation originally commissioned by Copenhagen’s Cisternerne.

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, through our talk with the artist this April, and in May’s feature on the places we’re losing.

PHI announced the closing stretch with a recorded curator conversation 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.