MoMA’s lobby becomes a living swamp for five months

From Oct. 12, the first room you hit at MoMA runs a marsh in real time. Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Wetland installs Berl-Berl, the artist's live simulation of Berlin's drowned wetlands, in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby through March 7, 2027. For five months, the museum's ground floor hosts a world that is always running: moving image and sound computed on the spot, never the same pass twice.

Berl-Berl started in the field. Steensen built it from months in Brandenburg's swamps and the archives of Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde, scanning rocks and flora with macro photogrammetry and assembling them in a game engine, with vocals by Arca and songs from Sorbian and Slavic traditions threaded through the sound. It premiered in 2021 at Halle am Berghain, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, and has kept mutating since.

Wetland is the next evolution, not a rehang. In the announcement, Steensen writes that the simulation "shifts from a total view towards a more fragmented, insect-like perspective." The god's-eye swamp becomes a swamp at compound-eye height, which is how we all want to see a wetland anyway: nothing that lives in one ever sees the whole thing. The presentation is organized by Juyeon Song and Lydia Mullin, per the exhibition page.

It's been great watching Steensen's practice since 2021, when Killscreen first wrote about Berl-Berl as a wetland dreamed into software, and we sat down with Steensen this spring to talk about engines as instruments for the landscapes we are losing.