Landscape Portrait #47, 2023
Rhoda Ting (b. 1985, Australia) and Mikkel Bojesen (b. 1988, Denmark) are a Copenhagen-based artist duo whose work unfolds between artistic inquiry and scientific research. Their projects explore questions of non-human agency, microbial ecologies, and imagined futures, frequently integrating living matter and laboratory processes into sculptural and performance-based installations. Through close collaboration with scientists, they engage bacteria, spores, and other organisms as active participants in their work, revealing biological processes that typically remain invisible. By cultivating living systems within artistic frameworks, they foreground interspecies entanglements and temporal rhythms that extend far beyond human perception.
In Deep Time, the artists invite audiences to reconsider human-centered notions of duration by evoking geological epochs that both precede and will outlast humanity. The piece presents Earth’s evolutionary record as a vast continuum, situating human existence as a fleeting moment within planetary history. In contrast, Rhizome shifts attention to the microscopic realm, emphasizing the complex, decentralized networks of fungal life. Constructed from petri dishes hosting living fungi, the installation functions as a dynamic organism in its own right — shaped by gradual growth, contingency, and collaboration between artist and microbe. As the work transforms over time, it resists fixed form and spectacle, instead proposing a slower, more attentive mode of viewing. Across their practice, Ting and Bojesen challenge conventional understandings of ecology, evolution, temporality, and aesthetics.
