Lea Porsager's Ice-Core Meditation Opens at Simian, Copenhagen

Lea Porsager's new solo exhibition at Simian in Copenhagen takes the ice core as its central motif, treating the frozen sample as both solid matter and an irreducible void. The show is accompanied by an exhibition booklet available through ssiimmiiaann.org. The gallery's concrete architecture is described as being held under pressure by a hole at the exhibition's centre, with reversed pyramidal windows and a metre-deep layer of cold water above the ceiling weighing down the room. Within this setting, objects titled beds lie hard and thin, prismatic mills stand immobile, and ice is kept frozen before being flattened into image and translated into data. The exhibition's conceptual anchor is a recent freezer malfunction at a Canadian laboratory that destroyed millennia-old ice cores drawn from the region's frozen depths, wiping out roughly twelve per cent of the laboratory's total collected ice — a figure close to the percentage by which Arctic Sea ice has declined each decade since monitoring began at the end of the 1970s. The show arrives three years after Porsager's previous Copenhagen solo presentation, a period in which the Doomsday Clock advanced by five seconds. Against a 22,000-year-old drop of melted ice, the text frames the space through Dante's Inferno, where the Devil is trapped waist-deep in a frozen lake, and through the rhyme 'white is stuck and red is flux'.