Australian-Danish duo Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen, whose practice is based between Melbourne and Copenhagen, work across sculpture, film and living installation to develop a methodology grounded in evolutionary biology, microbiology and environmental DNA. Their works are not static objects but living systems, cultivated through ongoing collaborations with scientists, laboratories, and the environments themselves.
HYBRID FUTURES, presented at Artbank in Melbourne as the duo’s first major Australian exhibition, brings this approach into focus. Developed across both hemispheres and supported by the Danish Ministry of Culture and Palaces, the exhibition positions their work within a broader exchange between art, science and policy.
Excerpt from Vault Issue 54 · Artist Feature · Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen
"There is a particular kind of art that challenges our conventional ideas of both art and the world we inhabit. Standing within HYBRID FUTURES, I quickly realised I was encountering a room full of such work, struggling to comprehend it, yet magnetically drawn in. Glass forms cradle microbial life in suspended transformation. Soft robotic creatures move among volcanic rocks. Sediment drawn from 12,000-year-old Arctic seabeds compress millennia into physical form. Everywhere, systems unfold beyond the artists’ control, processes that demand we let go. Here, art and science coexist to embody ideas I had never encountered before.
The more time I spent with the work, the more mesmerised I became, captivated by knowledge beyond my grasp. I cannot approach it and say, “This is an oil painting reminiscent of Rembrandt,” and thank goodness for that. The works resist the frameworks of art history and lean into theology and philosophy, stepping into a post-contemporary world that decentres the self and asks us to take stock of it.
I was fortunate to speak with Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen, and their words have stayed with me – they quietly unsettled the frameworks I was familiar with. They speak of intra-action, a concept developed by theorist Karen Barad, which proposes that humans, microbes, robots, sediment, and AI do not exist as independent entities passing each other by but emerge together."
