**Hard Core, Soft Bodies**. Intallation view at Schimmel Projects art centre, Dresden, DE.

There are many artists who can call you to imagine what our future might look like, but very few who can take you there. Reality and fabrication pause at the threshold of one of Stine Deja’s exhibits, as the Danish visionary uses color, sound, sculpture, and 3D animation to hold the viewer in a state of cerebral liminality. A celebrated artist with a plethora of solo and group exhibitions under her belt, Deja’s works form a kaleidoscope of expressions, all centered around one overarching sentiment – what does it mean to be human?

Whether she is exploring the potential of cryogenic freezing of bodies in her works Dawn Chorus and Thermal Womb, guiding you through a VR guided meditation in 4K Zen, or contributing to a harrowing, ominous digital tour through the ecological ruins in Chernobyl Papers, Deja’s pieces transport your psyche. Saturated colors imbue the space where sculptures and 3D works on digital screens come together – the movement and life on display echoed and invigorated by deliberate sound curation. A beautiful and harmonious dance between technology’s capacity to create and it’s presence within our material world, all we can do is watch as our future is fully realized before us – elevated by Deja’s capacity to call upon both what we know, and what we had never thought to visualize.

**Hard Core, Soft Bodies**. Part of ‘*A closed mouth gathers no feet*’ at Dash Gallery, Courtrai, BE.

I find your work overall so beautifully composed and incredibly thought-provoking – one aspect that intrigues me so much is your use of screens. Whereas some are more concealed (such as Thermal Womb), Dawn Chorus has them fully on display as the centerpiece of the wagons, and Hard Core, Soft Bodies includes the PHILIPS logos on the sides of the screens. Naturally, displaying 3D art in physical places will require a screen, but what do you hope to add to the pieces through the foregrounding of this aspect?

First of all, thank you! I’m very happy that you mention the screen focus, as it’s definitely one aspect of my practice that I continuously love exploring. For me the screen is a window that I can open up into an alternative world; this window inhabits the non-physical part of my practice. Like a painter would use shadows to create depth, I use the screen to add layers to the world I’m trying to create. Sometimes the “window” is wide open and other times you can only peak inside, but either way my intention is always to add more depth to the work.

**Thermal Womb**, sculpture series, 2019. Part of **Last Resort** installation at Annka Kultys Gallery, London, UK.

I think it definitely gives this affect, highlighting the centrality of the screen in how we have come to consume most art. Flesh and the human body are also key features of much of your work – what feeling do you hope to induce within your audience by presenting them with uncanny representations of themselves? And especially as it exists within the dialog of post-humanism, with the potentials of 3D art getting closer and closer to realism, how do you think it will influence your future projects?

It’s true I am fascinated by human bodies, and it’s such a powerful subject matter to bend and obscure because all of us have some attachment and familiarity with them! When audiences enter some of my recent shows, they are forced to consider bodily preservation, reconstruction or resurrection – and exploring these themes from a slightly skewed reality seems to induce an openness to the subject matter.

It’s a good point about the potential of 3D art drawing closer to realism, once I was at an art fair where I was showing some prints of Hard Core, Soft Bodies. Someone came over and asked why I had only brought the installation photographs, instead of bringing the ‘living’ sculptures. This moment of dissatisfaction from the person really stuck with me because I loved the assumption that the pieces existed ‘in real life’– this work was never physical in that sense, the representation of it was all there was, but it’s exciting for it to have been perceived beyond that. Using 3D art to create things close to what we experience enables me to choreograph interesting situations and always leads to some interesting conversations too!

That’s so insane – I remember I also had to take a moment upon first seeing the project to be able to distinguish whether or not it was a 3D work, or images of sculptures. I had that same experience when watching the 3D video of Dawn Chorus for the Goethe Instut. I also adore how you use color to saturate so many of your pieces! What goes into picking the central color for a show or exhibition, and what do you feel it adds to your works to have them consumed within these settings? Maybe it’s also just a stylistic/aesthetic preference, but I think the atmospheric difference between Cold Sleep and Dawn Chorus is not too overwhelming, while definitely playing with the viewers’ sense of reality.

As a disclaimer I probably have to mention that I love yellow (many shades of yellow), but you probably already guessed that! Working with color and saturation is actually something I’m very conscious of. It kind of reflects how I use sound and video, it’s another layer that plays with the viewers perception of the installation. I guess the overly saturated, almost unnatural, is something we are used to seeing through our screens where everything can be manipulated and filtered. But what happens when that representation of the world isn’t only something we observe on a retina display, but instead a detail that consumes our whole surrounding and is felt with the entire body?

**Cold Sleep**, installation view at Tranen contemporary art center, Hellerup, DK. Curated by Toke Lykkeberg. Photography by David Stjernholm.

We are more controlled by colours and saturation than we think, and that’s something that really fascinates me. In 2017 I read an article about an ex-google employee who, in the quest to overcome his phone addiction, set his phone to greyscale. This simple action made his beloved gadget completely dull and unappealing, despite it having exactly the same content as before, just with the colour drained out.

You also see it so often in advertising how the use of color theory actually makes a psychological impact on an audience (yellow is also my favorite color, so that feature jumped out to me immediately hahaha). Like you mentioned, many of your works also include sound – whether it be low hums, singing, infomercial style dialog, or speech-loops like in your piece Assembly. Sound curation is its entirely own form of art that adds an entirely new dimension to a collection or piece. What is one project that you feel would be entirely changed by either removing, or changing the audio accompanying it?

Sound is a huge part of my practice – it’s just one of those elements that people would only realise if they experience my work IRL. Sound is probably one of the biggest mood setters that I can think of, for example you shoot great HQ footage, but if the audio is bad, it completely overshadows the experience of the video. I have tried to incorporate this lesson from filmmaking into my work building visual worlds. All my installations have sound, and actually sound is often the starting point for me. I usually know what a show will sound like before I know exactly what it looks like.

**Dawn Chorus**, installation view at Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon, Videbæk, DK. Photography by Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen.

This was the case with Dawn Chorus, but also Assembly. Assembly started as a cacophony of anxious voices in my head, which I managed to narrow down to the sentence “We’re okay, are we gonna be okay?” and from that sentence I started imagining a post-catastrophic situation, where people gather at an assembly point, to assess what just happened. This work would have very little meaning for me without the sound, and the same goes for Dawn Chorus.

I think the sound was definitely what really stuck with me after first seeing Assembly, and was definitely so integral to understanding the full message of the work. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions! I find your work so breathtaking and truly epic, and I feel like your pieces tackle issues in a way that have incredible nuance and originality behind them. As one final question, considering your background in fine arts and design, did you ever imagine you would be building exhibitions and shows at the magnitude that you are now? Is there a specific moment when you saw your trajectory shift to the one you’re currently paving for yourself?

Thanks for saying that, I really appreciate it!

I had many points in my life where I honestly didn’t know where my heart and work would take me, and I feel as though I’ve lived with a “blurred” vision for many years – just hoping that the vague strands of a future I was seeing would become something more solid. I didn’t know that I would get the chance to build big exhibitions, but I always dreamed that I would. Over the past ten years I have experienced many gear changes, but I think the most important one was figuring out that making art wasn’t optional. At that point I realized that nothing else gives me purpose like this, so I decided to wholeheartedly go for it, take bigger risks and jump more into the unknown.