The Danish Pavilion 2026 announces the appointment of curator Chus Martínez to work with artist Maja Malou Lyse, exploring how Science, Fiction, and the Pornographic Image can help secure Human Reproductive Potential The Danish Arts Foundation announces the appointment of curator Chus Martínez to work with the artist Maja Malou Lyse on the Danish Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (9 May - 22 November 2026). The exhibition will explore how different image and value systems - science, fiction, and pornography - collaborate in shaping visions of the future, introducing a grounded, real-world dimension to public discourse through the paradoxical entanglement of fertility science and erotic imagery. The project will reflect Lyse’s media-conscious practice exploring sexuality, power, and representation in the digital age, alongside Martínez’s curatorial ethos rooted in care, criticality, and dialogue. Together, Martínez and Lyse have established a dedicated research and working group to develop a new project that expands Lyse’s ongoing inquiry: how the life of images affects the body and reality itself to such an extent that it may bear consequences for us as a species.

The commitment to engage with such a difficult question echoes the wish expressed by the Artistic Director of this Venice Biennial, Koyo Kouoh, whose philosophical framing In Minor Keys calls for art and artists to move beyond moralizing debates and to cultivate an attuned listening to voices systematically excluded from mainstream cultural legitimacy.

Born in 1993, Lyse is the youngest artist to represent Denmark in Venice. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 and has exhibited at, among others, ARoS, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Index Stockholm and O – Overgaden and performed at the National Museum of Denmark, Tate Modern and Moderna Museet. She currently lives in New York.

Martínez’s curatorial praxis centers on care, generosity, and active listening - she positions artworks as spaces for dialogue and learning rather than authority. Martínez believes art enables a new epistemology - a mode of knowing that enables us to feel alternative futures and possible scenarios, reframing how we understand reality. Chus is currently Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Switzerland and serves as Associate Curator at TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) in Madrid and Venice. She also serves as Artistic Director of the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.

Maja Malou Lyse (b. 1993, Denmark) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice interrogates the entanglements of desire, power, and mass media. At the core of her work lies a sustained inquiry into the body’s relationship to the image — a dynamic intensified by the visual demands of the digital age. Lyse examines how images shape sexuality, self-perception, and cultural memory, tracing how the pornographic imaginary and media history construct, transmit, and preserve desire over time.

Her work embeds itself within the platforms that dominate contemporary visual culture — television, tabloids, advertising, and social media — appropriating these spaces to expose the mechanics of spectacle. By reconfiguring familiar formats, she reveals how art and media coproduce one another, staging a reality that seduces, governs, and occupies the collective imagination.

Employing humor, ambiguity, and the vernacular of pop culture, Lyse confronts the visual saturation of modern life and its effects on identity and desire. She is recognized for her incisive engagement with the erotic image and the politics of representation, approaching complex social questions with both critical acuity and disarming wit.

Lyse holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2022). She has had solo exhibitions at Overgaden (Copenhagen) and Brandts Kunstmuseum (Odense), and has participated in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Denmark (Copenhagen), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Copenhagen Contemporary (Copenhagen), Blueproject Foundation (Barcelona), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), ARoS (Aarhus), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), and INDEX (Stockholm), among others.

In 2018–2019, she created and hosted Sex med Maja (“Sex with Maja”) for the National Danish Broadcasting Corporation — a TV programme combining performance, education, and social critique to explore the politics of sexuality in a digitally mediated era.

Born in Spain, Chus Martínez is a curator, writer, and academic with a background in philosophy and art history. She is currently Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Switzerland and serves as Associate Curator at TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary) in Madrid and Venice. She also served as Artistic Director of the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in 2025. Martínez is a board member of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) and sits on advisory boards of several international institutions, including Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Her previous roles include Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York; Head of Department at dOCUMENTA (13); Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona; and Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Known for her critical and experimental curatorial practice, Martínez has developed numerous exhibitions and projects in collaboration with contemporary artists worldwide. She writes regularly for international journals and contributes essays and texts to exhibition catalogues and books.

Recent exhibitions include The Oracle. Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (2025); Search for Life by Stephanie Comilang (TBA21 at the Thyssen Museum, Madrid, 2024); Doblad mis Amores (Collegium, February 2023); Living in Joy (Art Sonje, March 2023); Clear, Lucid and Awake (Art Sonje, 2024); and Mathilde Rosier (Fondation Pernod Ricard, May 2023).

Recent books include The Complex Answer: On Art as a Non-Binary Intelligence (Sternberg Press, 2023); Like This: Natural Intelligence as Seen by Art (Hatje Cantz, 2022); Coding Care (coedited with Sabine Himmelsbach, Hatje Cantz, 2022); Corona Tales: Let Life Happen to You (Lenz, 2021); and The Wild Book of Inventions (Sternberg Press, 2020).



Danish Arts Foundation promotes and supports Denmark’s contemporary art internationally through grants, collaborations and projects. www.kunst.dk

Rise of the Sunken Sun is commissioned and funded by Danish Arts Foundation, and realized with generous support from New Carlsberg Foundation, Eqqumiitsuliornermut Aningaasaateqarfik (Greenlandic Arts Foundation and Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces.