Denmark’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale reflects on the success and marginalization of pornography with the installation ‘Things To Come’
Three years ago, artist Maja Malou Lyse, 33, received the most unusual proposal of her career: the CEO of Cryos, the world’s largest sperm bank, offered her 20 liters of semen to make a sculpture. For Lyse, whose practice addresses issues such as female empowerment and the relationship between images, desire and media culture, the idea was so bizarre that she saw possibilities in it.
“I thought it was an interesting material and said yes,” she explains. “But after a while I realized I didn’t know what to do with it.”
The project ended up taking shape differently from the original plan, and today occupies Denmark’s national pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, which runs until November 22.
In the pavilion’s main space — titled Things To Come, a reference to H.G. Wells’s famous science-fiction novel — there is not a sculpture but massive screens showing a video starring female porn stars, surgically altered male bodies dressed in tiny bikinis, performing, in gestures typical of the genre, a script set in a fertility clinic.
