Exhibitions

Iter Subterraneum “Iter Subterraneum” is a group exhibition inspired by Ludvig Holberg’s novel Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741), often cited as the Nordic region’s first science fiction novel. The story follows a man who falls through a hole in the earth beneath Bergen and discovers a society governed by sentient trees. Here, the Enlightenment’s faith in reason and progress is united with fantasy, satire, and speculative thought. In Holberg’s subterranean universe, the trees possess both morality and rationality. Today, the novel can be read as an early reflection on ecology and utopian thinking, where branching and coexistence challenge humanity’s notion of superiority. The exhibition takes its name from Holberg’s original Latin title for the book and refers to a journey unfolding underground, in spaces often associated with the hidden, the overlooked, and the unconscious. “Iter Subterraneum” re-reads Holberg’s underground journey with a gaze directed towards the plant world. Here, the sentient trees become an image of other forms of sensing and reasoning—ways of perceiving and organising the world that do not regard the human as a central unit against which everything is measured. The subterranean and utopian landscapes open up as speculative spaces for thinking with nature rather than about it. In Galleries 1–4, works by ten artists from diverse geographical and linguistic contexts are presented. In various ways, they investigate connections between nature and technology, mythology and science, and the body and material. Several of the artists turn their gaze away from the human and towards life forms, narratives, and experiences that typically reside on the margins. As in Holberg’s book, several of the works contain both a belief in the possibilities of knowledge and a fundamental doubt about humanity’s place in the natural order. Through sculpture, film, painting, collage, and performance, the artists open up speculative spaces where plants, fungi, insects, and human bodies enter into shifting relationships. The exhibition approaches utopian thinking not as an endpoint but as a movement—a way of orienting oneself in encounters with nature, knowledge, and imagination. Curated by Silja Leifsdottir. 16 January – 15 April 2026 Bergen Kunsthall Bergen, Norway Group Show Mira Adoumier, Cecilia Fiona, Robert Gabris, Ingela Ihrman, Wangechi Mutu, Nour Ouayda, Ovartaci, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Kaare Ruud, Anicka Yi, Curated by Silja Leifsdottir.

Ghost Flower Ritual Ghost Flower Ritual is a multi-sensory and interdisciplinary artwork created by Danish visual artist Cecilia Fiona in collaboration with Danish composer Sophie Søs Meyer performed by musicians from the classical ensemble Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen. Ghost Flower Ritual brings together visual art, music and performance in a sensuous ritual that explores transience and the power of transformation in the face of today’s biodiversity crisis. The work is inspired by an alchemical myth of a flower that burns and rises from its own ashes. Cecilia Fiona has transformed CC’s Hall 6 into a magical landscape where architecture, paintings, sculptures and costumes come together in a living scenography of materials, colours and textures. The installation is brought to life through a series of live concert performances, in which Sophie Søs Meyer and the musicians from Athelas Sinfonietta activate the work with sound and music, while Cecilia Fiona’s sculptures and costumes are taken over by performers. The audience is invited to enter an occult ritual where flower spirits, the biodiversity crisis, and hopes for resurrection are woven together in a sensory and ceremonial experience. Supported by:Minister Erna HamiltonsLegat for Videnskab og KunstAage og Johanne Louis-Hansens FondStatens KunstfondKnud Højgaards FondBeckett FondenAugustinus FondenWilliam Demant FondenKoda KulturDet Obelske Familiefond April 2025 Copenhagen Contemporary Copenhagen, Denmark Exhibition

If This Is Paradise, I Wish I had a Lawnmower Group show by Adham Faramawy, Cecilia Fiona, Jen O’Farrell There was a shopping mall Now, it’s all covered with flowers You got it, you got it If this is paradise I wish I had a lawnmower You got it, you got it – Talking Heads ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ The 1988 song ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ by Talking Heads envisages a post-Anthropocene world where human activity no longer is the dominant influence on the world. Flowers grow where shopping malls once were, mountains and rivers stand where a factory was. Daisies cover the site of a former Pizza Hut. Yet our narrator is maudlin; what he really wants, is a burger. What he has though, is a rattlesnake for dinner. Despite our narrator’s ambivalence, it is clear that the song was a riposte to consumerist culture that was dominating the West at the time and would continue to do so up until the present – the accompanying music video features text about rates of deforestation and the increase in production of toxic waste. The song might be seen as a piece of subtle, measured and even wry agit-prop. This nuanced strand of thinking about environmental thinking can today be seen in re-wilding campaigns, purpose disruptors, collaborative community projects and artistic and creative thinking. All these strategies often accept that the strategic use of more direct action is useful but point towards more complex ways of re- thinking humanity’s relationships with the world around them. There is also an important caveat in some of these approaches – this is not a call for a return to a pre-lasparian world (we still might crave a burger) but a reaching towards an intertwining, of nature, humanity (and everything it has done) and what was thought to be separate or external from humanity. In the exhibition “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower” Adham Faramawy, Cecilia Fiona, and Jen O’Farrell exhibit works which evoke a world where the boundaries between bodies, species and landscapes are porous, shifting and in constant negotiation. These are works that quietly refute the prevailing conception of the human subject in Western thinking up until now, that the human is always a separate entity, to be considered apart and above other species and ecosystems. Instead of this way of thinking this exhibition proposes that the world around us is less of a backdrop and more of an at least equal protagonist; not separate but co-constitutive of our being in the world. The prevalence of wall-based and floor-based sculptural works through the show offer a sense of the tactile that is suggestive of one of the themes that runs through the exhibition; that of the ethics of entanglement. This framework insists on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman entities which includes animals and ecosystems but also includes objects and technologies associated with industrialisation and post- industrialisation. The surfaces of Faramawy’s works include technological detritus such as stray mobile phones and wires embedded on surfaces which depict rough earth, rock and stone. O’Farrell’s work brings together textures and surfaces that are suggestive of forests and the earth but also the urban and constructed. Meanwhile Fiona’s practice, encompassing painting, sculpture and performance invites viewers to consider how their own identities are interwoven with the wild and fantastical. Each of the artists’ works poses questions about where the body’s boundaries are in relation to its surroundings. Instead of the clear division that prevailing Anthropocene thinking has assumed, there is the more complex division that is alluded to in Faramawy’s series title ‘The stickiness of an unclean break’. Connections stubbornly remain despite the desire for a clean break. This might the human subject’s desire to separate from the landscapes around them, from other living organisms, or indeed from each other through a process of deeming certain groups other. This desire is doomed to fail; instead bodies and identities are indelibly linked to what surrounds them whether that is ecologies or other people. Our subjectivities blur in and out of each other and what surrounds us, always sticky and messy to the frustration of those who want to assert clean boundaries, borders and differences. Fiona’s work might also be understood as depicting the hybridity of being. The result of hybridity is a move away from essentialism to a sense of an ongoing sense of the interconnected with other people, histories and ecologies but also a wider connection with forces that could be mythical but might also well be quantum realities (or indeed both). Boundaries are momentary, their supposed fixity nothing more than an apparition that hides a state of flux and transformation. Transformation and interconnectedness are made manifest in the www.niruratnam.com Niru Ratnam surfaces and materiality of Fiona’s work, as they are with Faramawy’s and O’Farrell’s. With the latter, interconnectedness is also architectural – motifs within the work gesture towards the built environment and urban environments as much as more ancient landscapes such as woodland. Within that relationship is the question of how landscape has been transformed by human activity into the urban but also, vitally, the implication that this process might go the other way. This was a shopping mall, now it’s all covered with flowers. Landscape and human agency are interwoven in O’Farrell’s works, memory and history fused with layers of rock and soil. ‘If this is paradise….’ is an exhibition that insists on the lived encounter with what surrounds us and an exploration of what a new conception of intimacy might be through thinking about that process of perpetual interaction. Intimacy becomes a form of ecological resistance where we allow ourselves to reach out, touch and intertwine with phenomena which are no longer categorised as ‘non-human’ but instead perhaps as ‘more-than- human’. It is an exhibition that is against fixity, that instead revels in sites of encounter that are in turn fragile, entangled fugitive and joyously alive. Read more 6 June – 12 July 2025 Niru Ratnam Gallery London, UK Group

Infinite Pollination Andersen’s is pleased to introduce Infinite Pollination, Cecilia Fiona’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Fiona explores the symbiosis of life, both human and non-human, within a vast cosmic ecosystem. Through sculpture, performance, and painting, this exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries between body, cosmos, and the interconnected threads that weave life together. The exhibition is anchored in the concept of pollination—not just as a biological act, but as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things. Our bodies are like galaxies, home to countless microorganisms, open vessels where cycles are shared, crossed, and transformed across species and planetary systems. It is within this exchange, this pollination, that life itself continuously unfolds and evolves. The exhibition includes a live performance, Infinite Pollination, where a performer— dressed in one of the artist’s intricately sewn and painted costumes—moves among the sculptures, embodying the role of a cosmic pollinator. Carrying souls and creatures between worlds, the performer breathes movement and life into the works, as its voice—a fundamental instrument—resonates through the space. Through this act, the sculptures, some of which have movable parts, come alive as it transports their spirits across galaxies, blurring the boundaries between worlds, bodies, and times. Indtil pilen rammer (og natten føder en sol) (Until the Arrow Strikes (and the Night Births a Sun)) presents a spine pierced by an arrow, invoking Amor’s arrow from alchemical symbolism, where the merging of two elements sparks transformation. Here, love transcends mere emotion, becoming an elemental force that weaves the universe together, driving the cycles of movement and change. The twin themes of merging and transformation recur throughout the exhibition, most notably in Moons Merging, a wall sculpture where two beings entwine in an eternal embrace, their tails forming a DNA strand. In this work, the DNA itself becomes a symbol of love, its double helix held together by the connection of the two figures. The title refers to an astronomical event, the presence of two moons orbiting Earth—a temporary phenomenon that mirrors the transient yet significant moments of union and transformation. In She Knew herself a Galaxie the artist presents a large dark blue sculpture, depicting a creature carrying within it countless smaller beings. Its body is a crater, a sea, a galaxy—a vessel containing multitudes. This work explores the concept of the body as an ever- changing universe, a vessel that holds within it endless possibilities for creation and life. The concept also connects with the artist’s earlier sculpture, Twin Earth (I Inside the Vessel), as both sculptures embody a crater-like form, resembling oceans or womb-like bodies, with other beings dwelling within. A sense of cosmic origin and cyclical renewal imbues Protector of the Egg (It All Starts with 0). A pastel pink sculpture stands guard over a small egg nestled in a pile of soil, invoking both the number 0 and the symbol of the egg as a representation of nothingness and the beginning of everything. The circular form of 0 is central to the artist’s exploration of life cycles and cosmic regeneration, suggesting that creation is an eternal loop, with no clear beginning or end. The large painting Infinite Pollination presents an ambiguous space. Are we inside a body, or moving through the infinite vastness of outer space? Perhaps both. Threads of fate and pollen intertwine with stamen and the traces of long-forgotten species, creating a visual and conceptual link between past and future, micro and macro. The painting draws inspiration from particle collision imagery, where the movement of the smallest elements of the universe is captured in time and space. This collision of particles becomes a metaphor for the interactions between the universe and our own bodies—each collision, each pollination, bringing forth new life. Infinite Pollination reimagines our role within the cosmos, proposing that we are not merely inhabitants of Earth, but active participants in an ongoing process of transformation. Through the artist’s lens, pollination becomes an act of creation, of life-giving exchange, that transcends species, bodies, and time. 24 Oct– 23 Nov 2024 Andersen’s Contemporary Copenhagen, Denmark Solo show

A Poem Lovely As a Tree In the Nine Songs, it goes: The rites are accomplished to the beating of the drums; The flower-wand is passed on to succeeding dancers. Lovely maidens sing their song, slow and solemnly. Orchids in spring and chrysanthemums in autumn; So it shall go on until the end of time. At the end of the grand ancient ritual, witches passed flowers and danced, orchids in spring and chrysanthemums in fall, until the end of history. Myths and religions were born out of the curiosity and fear of nature from mankind. Throughout their long history, they have tried to explain the logic between heaven, earth and mankind in various languages until modern times, when they were gradually replaced by verifiable science. The first people revered nature, worshipped it and learned from it, the description of the relationship between nature and man in mythological and religious narratives is not entirely delusional. Emotional experience of mankind is closely related to nature. Since the ancient times, human beings have relied on mountains, rivers, plants and seasonal scenery as their emotional support. There are 152 species of plants in The Book of Songs, every blade of a tree and every petal of a flower were once an extension of people’s spirit and body. Human feelings and life forms are analogous and connected to all things in heaven and earth, even in contemporary era when we are constantly alienated from nature, we still need to project and shape our own appearance through all beings in the universe: the morning dew could be the fleeting time; the brightness after the rain could be the noble character of a gentleman; the spring sunshine on the grass could be the loving kindness of the parents. Human emotions, value systems and cognitive structures are all molded through the perception, observation, and description of all beings in nature. Surrounded by concrete and artificial light, contemporary people are accustomed to borrowing everything in the world to express themselves, but it is increasingly difficult for them to get close to and perceive the existence and changes of nature. When young people boast about their lofty ambition of Hong Hu (The Chinese idiom Hong Hu zhi zhi, using the bird Hong hu as a metaphor for a noble man), have they ever looked up for birds? When we celebrate the resilience of the grass in the field, how much time has passed since the last time we touched the verdure? We see ourselves as the center of heaven and earth, and all things are for our use. Our long indifference, arrogant pride, and exploitation of the world’s natural resources have made the relationship between us and the rest of creation more and more severed. These divisions not only destroy the natural environment on which all life depends, but also erode our own spiritual experience and the richness and veracity of our perception of the outside world. Sixi Museum is proud to present a new group exhibition on the theme of nature. The exhibition includes works by artists from many countries who explore the relationship between humans and the environment through a variety of media. Some of them use natural and organic materials to minimize the impact of contemporary art industry on the environment; some focus on the logic of nature in religion and use visual methods to tell the story of how everything works alike the cycle of the four seasons, the moon rises and the stars fall, and how the beauty of life is the beauty of nature itself; There are also artistic experiments that connect individuals, society, history, and other aspects through a certain natural element. Through this exhibition, we hope to show some vivid possibilities on the topic of nature. We hope that this exhibition will encourage more people to observe, discover and cherish nature, to think about the intrinsic connection between ourselves and the environment, and to re-examine the way of interaction between mankind and the world of nature. Cecilia Fiona, born in 1997 in Copenhagen, Denmark, has a unique technique of painting with rabbit skin glue mixed with handmade natural pigments to create a clear and dreamy translucent effect. In addition to painting and sculpture, music and clothing are also important mediums for Fiona, who tries to expand her inspiration into three-dimensional space through the dialogue of different senses, constructing a mysterious and contradictory spiritual world. Like a lost scene from an ancient myth, Fiona explores the philosophies of nature and the mysteries of the heaven and earth with imaginative romanticism by depicting the fluid intertwining of mankind and nature, between the unreal and the real. The mixed faces of humans, animals, and plants; new creatures born from women’s mouths; angels spreading their wings and flying towards something; the fusion of clothing and performances that treat the body as an unrestricted container… In Fiona’s paintings, sculptures and costume installations, a series of prehistoric and futuristic creatures coexist and become entangled, like the images of ancient Roman cave monsters, full of grotesque themes and conflicting elements. Fiona freely creates her own universe, an ancient mythological world before the birth of order, where there is no opposition between life and death, earth and heaven, or fixed boundaries between nature, humans and animals. “I am me and at the same time you.” Fiona’s work closely connects the human subject to its surroundings and the natural world, rejecting the idea that humans are superior to nature, that everything changes and is never finalized. The human body and mind, the vastness and immensity of nature, the past, present and future, cross species and time and space, melting into the myth of chaos and walking into Fiona’s vision of a new world of conception. 2024 SIXI Museum Nanjing, China Group show Kiki Xue, Amanda Baldwin, Simon Linington, Emily Avery Crow, Cecilia Fiona, Qian Qian, Emma cc Cook Curated by Zheng Shu

Weaving Time, Spinning Spine VITRINE is pleased to announce Danish artist Cecilia Fiona’s first solo exhibition at the gallery which presents a new body of paintings, sculpture and performance exploring the existential mysteries of life. Fiona’s unique technique for painting uses rabbit skin glue mixed with handmade and natural pigments, applied to the canvas with a small, thin brush. This meticulousness means that her work is full of detailed, complex compositions, blending figures and landscapes into one another creating a state of flow and tumult on the canvas dissolving the boundaries between bodies and the world. Fiona’s new series of paintings create dreamlike landscapes that depict androgynous figures, blossoming flowers, and bizarre panoramas full of chaos and magic. These works incorporate a richer colour palette that moves away from a previous semi-translucent, dusty finish, to a darker and bolder canvas, echoing the more detailed observations of fantastical worlds and the macro- and microcosms of the universe. Finding influence within complex areas of scientific study including quantum physics and string theory, Fiona visualises the construction and connection of the world through the invisible and how this influences our relationship to what we can see. The work ‘Weaving time, spinning spine’ (2023) shows a spine running through the canvas with nerves connecting fields of existence together, using the body as an analogy for a universe full of biomes and micro organisms; an ecosystem seemingly invisible yet teeming with life. Fiona further explores the permeation of energy between inner and outer worlds in the work ‘Curled branches, gates unlocked’ (2023), depicting winged figures flowing through portals and nerve like fibres wrapping around to form the shape of a shell. Fiona’s compositions explode with the excitement of a bustling cosmos of beings both macroscopic and microscopic. This new body of paintings further examines the constructions of reality through the invisible forces of energy. ‘Answers from angels (look at the old, look at the young, look at our shrine, look at our time)’ (2023) interpolates forms of the organs of a flower alongside images of winged angels moving within a world brimming with flowing lines of energy, connecting beings physically and temporally with the fabric of the past, present, and future of the universe. Alongside her wall-based paintings, Fiona expands her work into the 3-dimensional, with new sculptural works and a painted jute canvas costume, which will be used in an improvised, durational performance taking place in the space at moments throughout the PV. The costumed performer interacts with the sculptures in the space, and reflects the imagery in the paintings, utilising a repertoire of movements that are slow and attempt to transform into something other and to connect to the earth and the cosmos. 19 Jan – 9 Mar 2024 VITRINE London, UK Solo show

Follow the Flowers ‘Andersen’s is delighted to present Cecilia Fiona’s first solo exhibition Follow the Flowers at the gallery. The exhibition features a series of new works that explore the relationship between humans and nature, pointing to the eternal transformation of all things and the constant movement toward new stages of life. In Follow the Flowers, Cecilia Fiona presents her own magical world, rooted in the timelessness of myth. Her works leave room for the inexplicable and the paradoxical, weaving together a cosmos of wondrous new ecosystems far removed from the world we know. Ornamental streams of energy burst forth from the earth’s core, blooming as they flow into the sky. Here, everything is interconnected in perpetual motion—both what we can see and what we can feel. All life is liberated energy, interacting within new ecosystems in Fiona’s landscapes. In these works—painted with rabbit-skin glue and pigment—we find ourselves in a cosmos that could be a mythical world from an undefined primordial past. Or perhaps we are witnessing life in a distant future, maybe in another galaxy, where humanity has adapted to new, caring natural laws. In this world, people exist without longing for a body. They have transformed into sprouting faces, possibly a new species, peacefully floating through blue oceans while life unfolds, blossoms, and disappears around them. Fiona’s worlds and their inherent beings are inextricably linked in an organic flow marked by deep care for one another and the shared universe. They exist only through close connection—so close, in fact, that their fingers grow together. Fiona’s universe can be experienced as a dream, one less concerned with possessing the material and more with freely imagining and creating a fully realized universe in constant motion, where all organisms, large and small, care for one another. Alongside the eight paintings, the exhibition includes two sculptural folding screens with imagery on both sides. In addition, two unique, sewn costumes will serve as living sculptures during the opening performance Creatures of Silence, featuring performers Sofie Sahlholdt and Antonia Harke. Throughout the opening on August 18, the space will be inhabited by these two beings/living sculptures—unlike traditional sculptures, they are in motion and thus alive rather than static and eternal. The performance can be experienced as an encounter between body and painting—between physical reality and fiction—and as an attempt at a different kind of sensing. What happens in that meeting—will the boundary between the world of the paintings and our own be broken? Is it possible to perceive the world from a non-human perspective? To become something else?’ 18 August – 19 September 2022 Andersen’s Contemporary Copenhagen, Denmark Solo exhibition