What kind of person loves a swamp? Henry David Thoreau, for one: When he wasn’t communing with Walden Pond, Thoreau sang the praises of swampland immersion, sinking to your chin in muck, “lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes.” But he didn’t win a lot of converts.
Now the Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen is giving it a shot. He has created a digital simulation of a swamp, highly suggestive of the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes but lacking their bite. Opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Oct. 12, the exhibition showcases the latest in his series of game-engine-driven video and sound simulations called “Berl-Berl.” (“Wetland” is the name of the exhibition, “Berl-Berl” the name of the sole artwork it contains.)
The first iteration was displayed in Berlin in 2021 in the Halle am Berghain, inside a Soviet-era power plant turned icon of the underground club scene. “A sensual, surreal, fascinating visual history of what the last ice age glaciers left behind,” Berliner Zeitung called it. Each iteration since has provided a deep dive — literally at times — into the swamps Berlin was built on during the Middle Ages, with vocals by Arca, the deeply transgressive, Barcelona-based singer-producer-performance artist. “So ‘Berl-Berl’ is like a singing swamp,” Kudsk Steensen said.
We were making our way through some wetlands as he spoke — a marshy preserve on the outskirts of Copenhagen, a short bike ride from his studio and even closer to his home. The site was crisscrossed with the residue of human civilization: railroad lines, canals bordered with reeds and bulrushes, waterside vacation homes that started out a half-century ago as hippie squatters’ shacks. Footpaths wend through the scrubby brush. Kudsk Steensen, 39, tall and square-jawed, likes to come here to think.
“Berl-Berl” takes its name from a Slavic word for “swamp,” a reminder of the Slavs who lived there before Germanic settlers moved in. “Berl” is also the source of the name Berlin. Much of what you see in “Berl-Berl” recalls the swamps Berlin was built on and that still survive in the Spreewald, an inland delta some 60 miles away.
The original “Berl-Berl” was presented on nine wall-size screens and 29 speakers across the cavernous Halle am Berghain. Each subsequent version has been different. “At MoMA, it’s made to envelop you — but with a sense of … dance,” Kudsk Steensen teased. “Things appear. They vanish. They’re dark. They’re bright. They’re vocal.”
Though he has had solo shows at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Fondation Beyeler and the Museum of Design in Zurich, this is his first in the United States. It will be displayed on the 24-by-24-foot digital screen in MoMA’s garden lobby — the same screen that showed Refik Anadol’s artificial-intelligence-generated extravaganza “Unsupervised” three years ago, scandalizing critics while mesmerizing museum-goers (and their kids). But where Anadol’s work feels hyperkinetic, often frenzied, Kudsk Steensen’s has been hailed as part of the “slow media” movement, a philosophical offshoot of slow food. Also, it doesn’t rely on A.I.
It does rely on digital technology, which he describes as hard-edge, structured, linear. But then there is the other part. “I have to follow where the water goes, where the roots go,” he said. “So I get this nice, mushy, transformative part in my creative process. That’s why I like working with wetlands and swamps.”
As in work, so in life. “I don’t know for what reason,” he added, “but I always end up living in areas like this.”
Beyond the Garden Fence
Kudsk Steensen’s formative years were spent on Denmark’s wild and wet west coast, in the tiny village of Norre Nissum, in an area of Denmark that is conservative, religious and sparsely populated. There were wetlands all around: brackish ponds by the sea, full-on swamps just past the garden fence. He liked it. “You have space to be someone else,” he said as we sat in his white-walled Copenhagen studio, in a low, red brick factory building that was built a century ago. “You kind of imagine.” But there was no denying it was lonely.
Then, when he was 11, he discovered video games. “The game for me was ‘Half-Life,’” he said, “a story-driven, three-dimensional game that just, like, changed the field to what it is today.” “Unreal Tournament,” came out a year later, in 1998, and with it a tool that could create new levels in which the game could be played. So he downloaded the tool, which was called Unreal Engine. Suddenly he could build entirely new digital environments. Swamps, anyone?
He moved to New York after art school, living in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn and then in Jersey City, near the marshes that back onto the Statue of Liberty. To support himself he made virtual reality videos for organizations like the Rainforest Alliance, first working for somebody else’s production company, then on his own. Eventually he started making the videos not as promotional material for a client, but as art.
It was slow going at first. But then Kudsk Steensen attracted the attention of Berlin’s LAS Art Foundation, which commissions works by emerging artists on issues like climate change. “He was not known by any means,” said Bettina Kames, the director of LAS, “but I was struck by his unique voice, and also by his deep knowledge about technology. He really stood out.”
LAS commission in hand, he soon started working with Kim Mortega, an ornithologist at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History, and Matt McCorkle, who would record the sounds of the swamp. Before long they were kayaking through the heavily forested swamps of the Spreewald together. “He said, you know, I’m an artist, but I love to watch experts or see over their shoulders from behind and see what they see,” Mortega said. He would slosh chest-deep through the water. He would take thousands of photographs of a rock or a frog and use photogrammetry to recreate them as virtual 3-D objects. Back in Berlin, he would dive into the museum’s records and samples.
He knew the drill from working with game engines: “Doing initial research, writing a story, and then thinking about, OK, how do you transform that into a space — a virtual space that has a story inside it?” he said. “‘Berl-Berl’ was created as a world where other stories can also appear” — his own, or other artists’ working in collaboration.
The Murk Below
In the five years since “Berl-Berl” was introduced, Kudsk Steensen has generated multiple stories that take place in the same virtual world or one that’s closely related. What they have in common is not just swamps but also a fascination with the folklore of swamps. Many major cities were built on wetlands: Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Mexico City, Houston, Shanghai. In a world without roads, wetland waterways served as trade routes. But in 18th-century Europe, the swamps were drained. In other places, like Houston, they were simply paved over. They had become an impediment to progress. They offended the rational mind.
Yet all this progress has helped produce a climate crisis, and these not-so-attractive wetlands could do a lot to mitigate the flooding that results. No one would mistake “Berl-Berl” for a nature documentary, but implicit within it is a plea for sanity as the earth grows progressively less hospitable to life. “It’s fascinating,” said Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design and its founding director of research and development. “This most technological part of the museum is the one that really digs into nature, into consciousness.”
The world of “Berl-Berl” is also a pagan world, mystical and esoteric. The giant tree in the MoMA installation is not just a tree; it is Triglav, the three-headed god that was worshiped in the Spreewald and elsewhere until Christians stamped out the other gods and imposed their own.
Triglav assumes different forms in different mythologies. In one, “it’s like a snake king,” Kudsk Steensen said. “And in another mythology, it’s this navigational system from the underworld to our world and through the trees to the heavens.” In yet another, it’s a tree that lives partly in the water, partly on the earth, partly in the sky. In all these cases, “the idea is that you can navigate life and death and the world through the Triglav.”
Another entity you may encounter in the Berl-Berl world — though not in the installation at MoMA — is Nokken, the water spirit. He appeared for the first time in “The Song Trapper,” part of an offshoot that appeared last year in Paris and can next be seen at the modern art museum in Luxembourg. In Nordic mythology, Nokken is often presented as a shape-shifting menace that can appear, among other guises, as a handsome young man whose music lures people to their death in the waters. Kudsk Steensen presents him simply as a guide to the swamps, always looking a bit lost.
At this point in his life, the tool Kudsk Steensen found as a kid has long since supplanted any interest in video games themselves. “What I like is the poetics” of these virtual worlds, he said as we sat in his studio, a copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s eco-thriller “Hummingbird Salamander” on his desk, the afternoon sun slanting in through enormous, steel-frame windows. “And the idea that you have to research something and build some story and concepts and turn that into this virtual piece of architecture … that’s my passion.”
Wetland
From Oct. 12 to March 7, 2027, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212-708-9400, moma.org.
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