Little Slop of Horrors

Maja Malou Lyse b. 1993, Denmark Follow +

Maja Malou Lyse’s first encounter with contemporary art was unapologetically pornographic. Denmark’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale was taken as a newborn to Jeff Koons: Retrospective, when it toured her hometown of Aarhus in 1993; somewhere above the pram loomed Made in Heaven (1989), a cycle of billboard‑scale photographs and glass sculptures in which Koons and his then‑wife, the Italian porn star Cicciolina, perform a porn‑baroque kama sutra. Three decades on, Lyse calls the work “unfortunately my favourite artwork”, and invited Cicciolina to perform at her Venice opening party, as if to step directly into its lineage. Her own attempt to fold a new era of virtual-reality pornography into her conceptual practice proves oddly artless.

The installation unveiled this week, Things to Come, is a three-channel video housed in a large booth filling the Danish pavilion’s main hall. Lyse developed the video with the artist collective DIS, while research studio Common Accounts worked on the exhibition design. At 29.5 metres long and four metres high, the screen threatens to swallow the viewer whole. The title loosely nods to HG Wells’s Edwardian science-fiction novel, but Lyse is more invested in the “cheeky” pun. The result—in her words, “a porn musical”, which is partly set in a sperm bank—unfolds in a space that doubles as a jerk room (minus the man-size Kleenex). “In the beginning, I was calling it a bimbo sci-fi,” Lyse tells me when we meet online during the biennale’s opening week, “But then the film got this musical element. It was really unexpected.” She has spent the last month in Venice, trying to “settle” before the opening. On screen, she appears in a simple white tank top, platinum-blonde hair tied back and glossy nails flashing. She is warm and animated, laughing easily as she talks.

“In the beginning, I was calling it a bimbo sci-fi”

Lyse, at 33 the youngest artist to represent Denmark in Venice, works at the intersection of pornography, feminism and mass media. Recent projects include MM (2024), for which she flew to Hollywood to bid on a gold-framed nude of Marilyn Monroe that once hung in Hugh Heffner’s Playboy Mansion; and Bombshell, Boom (2024), which draws on archives of Danish “Page 9” models, many photographed before the current age of consent. She follows erotic images from billboards and auction houses into the algorithmic churn of the feed, where they return as recyclable soft-core.

By her own account, Lyse barely watches porn, but it’s obvious quarry in an image economy where it ranks as the most routinely consumed image genre on earth. Things to Come grew from what Lyse calls “a secret bag of unfinished ideas”, including a trip to the AVN Awards in Las Vegas at Resorts World, which have been dubbed the “Oscars of porn”. “I met so many girls from the industry,” she recalls. One of them was Nicolette Shea, a former Playboy cybergirl, who she met on the red carpet after sneaking into the press area. Now 39, Shea has ridden the industry’s conveyor belt of types: first a Playboy favourite with ice‑blonde hair, sprayed‑gold body and impossible curves, now folded into the MILF category. “She really caught my eye. I have a soft spot for busty platinum blondes,” says Lyse. “I instantly knew I wanted to work with her. I was so obsessed—she’s been in the industry for 20 years, she’s a legend.”

Much of the film unfolds in the sperm bank’s fluorescent corridors. On the large screens, Shea prowls Cryos International, the world’s largest fertility clinic, cast as its least-appropriate lab technician in a white coat or black micro-bikini, a smear of semen on her chin. She toys with the equipment: an orange vial shuddering on the shakers, a silver cryo tank coughing up dry ice as she fishes out a sample with forceps. Around her, a warped synth score slithers through the booth, periodically shredded by static crackle and violin scrapes, as if the soundtrack were being prodded and overstimulated along with everything else.

Men surface briefly to fiddle with instruments—a stand‑in for other forms of self‑play. The installation stitches together vignettes inspired by TikTok and clips from the AI content mill, which are remade with real bodies. “It’s crazy how much we were inspired by slop content,” she tells me. Three more porn performers appear in studio sequences filmed at the special‑effects studio Planet X in New York. The women run nude on treadmills in slow motion, breasts ricocheting while a glitching digital forest scrolls behind them. In another scene, a star clenches a toothbrush between her teeth while she scrubs another woman’s mouth, foam dribbling down in a pantomime of oral sex.

“Porn is such a distinct visual language. You don’t need penetration to know what’s going on”

The aesthetic is less porn studio, more deranged “For You” page, where kink, comedy and algorithmic nonsense collapse into one endless scroll. “I wanted to create a surreal visual language that was familiar but abstracted”, she says, “to make you feel that you fall into several dimensions of an image…We were playing around, we decided to make sense of it when we edited…. I’m bad at inventing, I prefer to remix… I’m not able to write a script of storyboard, I want to go with the flow… I think about it as a collection of vignettes.”

Lyse, who now lives in New York, came to prominence in 2018 with Sex with Maja, a three-part show she hosted on Danish national television, turning the screen into a site of sexual pedagogy and performance. From there she moved into sculpture, producing works with a taste for the overblown, such as Sex Is Not a Natural Act (2019), a gigantic bubblegum-pink dildo slicked in car paint, and later training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She keeps testing where porn ends and art begins, often inserting her own body into the work: in Bombshell, Boom, for example, she stepped into the “Page 9” archive, posing in a Danish tabloid published on the day the show opened in a midnight-blue bikini with a gold number 9 stamped on one breast—briefly becoming a soft-porn pin-up.

“The aesthetic is less porn studio, more deranged “For You” page, where kink, comedy and algorithmic nonsense collapse into one endless scroll”

Things to Come feels like a continuation of this trajectory. Lyse again steps into the frame, first in a cameo beside Shea as lab assistant and uncanny double with a matching white coat and semen-smeared chin, and later as a kind of puppet master in the special-effects studio, where the camera tracks up a ladder to reveal Lyse as the puppet master, her blue-gloved hands tugging strings that make one of the star’s breasts bounce with a deliberately fake, cartoonish flourish.

Set against this is the unnervingly real backdrop of AI porn, which is already refashioning the industry that once simply feared free streaming platforms. Jon Ronson was charting the havoc wreaked by Pornhub almost a decade ago in his podcast The Butterfly Effect (2017); now performers face a sharper question: do we even need bodies at all? Deepfake tools can stitch convincing humanoids from scraped selfies and film stills, churning out synthetic performers and non‑consensual “bikini” versions of anyone with a public face. Lyse’s work brushes against this anxiety but doesn’t linger. Her target is another industry, which runs on visual stimulation but still depends on bodies to produce a substance science cannot yet manufacture: sperm.

Denmark is the world’s biggest exporter of sperm, catering to a global appetite for “Viking” genes: the fantasy of tall, blond, healthy donors. It was the first country to legalise pornographic images, and it is home to Cryos International, founded in Lyse’s hometown of Aarhus in 1987. Three years ago, she received a cold call from Cryos’s CEO Ole Schou, who had spent five years amassing 20 litres of sperm and wanted to turn it into an artwork. “It was the strangest commission ever,” she recalls. The chief executive went on to make his own giant-egg sculpture without her assistance, but a field trip lodged the faculty’s peculiar choreography in her mind.

What hooked Lyse was the architecture: on one side of a wall, the jerk room, a dark den with a leather couch and premium Pornhub cued up; on the other, a gleaming lab of gloves, pipettes and centrifuges. Here, desire and biotech sit back-to-back, the most basic drives feeding directly into high-spec fertility work. Cryos has experimented with VR porn for donors, where scenes are filmed with 360-degree cameras from the performer’s point of view. Recent studies suggest that VR erotica can increase sperm motility (the share of sperm swimming well enough to reach an egg) while the very same forms of stimulation are linked to erectile dysfunction. Lyse seized on this paradox. The installation spirals out from it, probing how images act on the body and how visual stimulation moves from screen to tissue, with consequences that are at once physical, economic and political.

What’s striking is how little actually happens: the film is full of porn’s signals but no sex. “Porn is such a distinct visual language,” Lyse explains. “You don’t need penetration to know what’s going on.” Hyper‑femininity does the heavy lifting via acrylic nails, augmented breasts and strategically minimal bikinis, styling the body as something already coded for performance, purchase and demand. When I ask her what it means to work so closely with slop, Lyse describes the project as “putting the labour back into image‑making”, insisting on real bodies and real choreography in an era of frictionless AI porn. For me, the work rarely pushes beyond reproducing that same visual language; despite the sweat and staging, the images end up feeling closer to AI‑generated slop than a genuine disturbance of it.

“My presence, whether I want it or not, is a part of the work”

At certain points in the film, women’s crotches fill the entire field of vision, the camera retreating from a tight triangle of Lycra and waxed skin casts the viewer as a Lilliputian pinned between their thighs. These are the work’s most stimulating passages, and the charge comes from scale. “They’re majestic women,” Lyse laughs, “King Kong vibes”—a throwaway line that invokes Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory (2006), which recasts the “monstrous” female body as a site of power. At the level of scale, the imagery also evokes “giantess porn”, a surprisingly popular search category where desire coheres around titanic women and tiny, overpowered men, in fantasies of being belittled and crushed. In the pavilion, the buxom stars taunt the viewer, cast as the unseen man in the jerk room, mocked for his pathetic output (“the count was low,” one performer says, looming above; “you can’t even afford the fantasy,” another adds), and reducing him to what the bank wants him to be: a resource to be drained.

Asked what the pavilion’s preview will feel like, Lyse laughs. “People think I’m extroverted but I’m a granny, I’m shy.” Still, she knows she is part of the spectacle. “Of course my presence, whether I want it or not, is a part of the work,” she says. “I love it when you can see who the artist is next to the work. It is an extension of you.” —[O]

Maja Malou Lyse, Things to Come (until 22 November) at the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Main image: Installation view of Things To Come (2026) at the Danish pavilion. Photo: Mihail Novakov for Ocula.