Lea Porsager: …and snEEzE, Simian

Lea Porsager’s exhibition …and snEEzE unfolds as a speculative environment of optical diffractions, polarized ice cores, and repellent materials. Drawing on quantum physics, tantric technologies, and feminist thought, the works inhabit different collapsing time-scales: Glacial time, space-time, and psychic time.

At the core of the exhibition is a parody of Goethe’s Faust, staged in Copenhagen in 1932 during the formative years of the Niels Bohr Institute. In the play, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli appeared as the trickster Mephistopheles. An archival caricature from the play, punctured with two holes, allows visitors to peer into a cold, enclosed chamber. Inside, a film work of a polarized ice core appears. Unfolding over exactly 85 seconds, the work references the so-called Doomsday Clock, which in 2026 stands at 85 seconds to midnight, symbolizing the closest humanity has come to a human-made global catastrophe.

Shaped by Simian’s subterranean architecture, …and snEEzE takes the gallery’s cold, bunker-like atmosphere as its point of departure. Throughout the exhibition, references to theoretical physics appear displaced and transformed, generating an atmosphere where scientific imaginaries and psychic states collapse into one another. Developed through research at the Niels Bohr Institute’s ice-core archive, the exhibition brings together polarized ice, vacant beds, chakra mills, and untethered thought-forms. Scientific material transmutes into an anarchic wasteland reigned by fractured time, dulled senses and catatonic anxiety.

Text by Simian

The exhibition is supported by Fake Foundation, and presented in collaboration with Yonder, Art · Science, at the Niels Bohr Institute.