15.1.—22.2.2026

As part of Kohta’s collaboration with St. Chads in London and its initiator Benjamin Orlow, we are showing, in the studio, an excerpt from an installation by Stine Deja (Denmark, 1986). She is an artist who is gaining international visibility for her installations with constructed, found and moving-image components that may be regarded as figurative tableaux and are usually inspired by both science-fiction and state-of-the-art science.

‘I am interested in a rolling, unsettled present’, Deja says. This interest has often centred on transhumanism, a movement advocating the use of technology to overcome our biological limitations and attain a superior ‘posthuman’ state. The installation Thermal Womb (2019) originally consisted of five human-sized figures, wrapped in green thermal sleeping bags and suspended upside down inside stainless-steel trays stood on end in small mounds of terracotta-coloured sand. We show two of these units here, but without the sand.

The preservable humanity of each figure is signalled by the cocoon-like shape of the sleeping bags and by a pair of eyes – it is hard to tell if they are also upside down or not – that we see on video screens placed where the face should be, under the laced-up thermal hoodies These eerily puppet-like sculptures double as credible illustrations of how one of the biggest companies within cryopreservation, Alcor, stores bodies before they are immersed into metal vats filled with liquid nitrogen. Hundreds of bodies across the world have been prepared for immortality in this way.

Deja has studied interactive design at the Kolding School of Design in Denmark and the moving image at the Royal College of Art in London. It is as if her work communicates a desire to unsettle the uncomfortable (to many) dictum that art is not about communication. Her special skill is to make us who believe in it doubt its fundamental truthfulness. Perhaps this is something visual art could and should be striving for after all, to find the most efficient ways of communicating an interest, an insight, an understanding.

If an artist – in this case Deja – is strongly engaged in an issue – in this case people’s desire for engineered self-enhancement – she should perhaps be doing precisely this: building her own visual grammar that allows her to attract and hold attention and to place cues in our field of vision to sway us in her direction.

When we browse Deja’s website, we notice that she uses some elements repeatedly, until they become her tropes, the building-blocks of her visual discourse – or her communications strategy. There is, as we have seen, the use of a device (usually a video screen) for a face and the use of an upside-down face (or a pair of upside-down eyes) within that gesture. There are the down jackets or sleeping bags and the strong colours that take on a signalling function.

Orlow, who recently exhibited another, more recent, work by Deja at St. Chads, says: ‘In this constellation of three artists at Kohta, Stine represents the act of triangulation, the third position that brings the human figure into focus and direct view, and at the same time speaks of consciousness, of articulated desires and quests. To me, Stine introduces “the protagonist”, while Maija and Bianca, both in their own way, present something more abstract or even subconscious, an “inner and outer space” in which the human body is immersed.’

Stine Deja’s solo exhibition at Kohta is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and Kulturfonden for Finland og Danmark (the Cultural Fund for Finland and Denmark).