HFBK

Boris Magrini: While working on your solo exhibition at HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, I remember us discussing artificial intelligence, which you referred to as Artificial Stupidity, the title of one of your ongoing projects. Have your ideas about artificial intelligence and similar technologies changed over time, particularly in light of the wider population’s increasing use of tools such as large language models and video generators? Do you find yourself using such AI tools more often?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: My view hasn’t really changed since we first spoke about Artificial Stupidity. These systems grew out of histories of colonialism and cybernetic control, extraction, governance. Their architecture carries those genealogies. Of course, I also use AI tools, but they remain tools, not the work itself. If you look at large language models, they are built on everything already written, scraped and digested. They don’t invent; they remix. In that sense, artificial intelligence as such doesn’t exist, yet it is still a mirror of human archives, with all the biases and violences embedded.

Boris Magrini: The topics you approach are interconnected, and so you create meta-narratives through your work, touching on and correlating different areas ranging from information technologies to the environment, interspecies relations, and cultural heritage. When preparing institutional shows, what role do storytelling and scenography play in presenting your work? How relevant is the visitor’s journey to your presentation choices?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Storytelling and scenography are central to my work. When I build an institutional show, I think of it as world-building, a stage where visitors become travellers. The path matters: how someone enters, what they encounter first, how the senses are activated. This journey is important not only for communicating an idea, but also for opening up the possibility of seeing beyond human perspectives into non-human relations, into multispecies realities. Without that dramaturgy, the work would remain flat.

Boris Magrini: Your multimedia works often combine organic materials with off-the-shelf industrial products, such as plastic toys, DIY electronics and inflatables. I sense a clash not only of aesthetics and materialities, but also of ideologies: nature versus technology; arts and crafts versus consumer goods; high culture versus low culture, and so on. Is your work an attempt to transcend these dichotomies, or are you looking to exploit their tensions?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: I combine organic and industrial materials because they already belong together. A laptop exists only because of minerals, lithium and rare earths: it is nature reorganized. The distinction between technology and organic life is artificial. By placing algae next to a battery, or inflatables next to wood, I want to show these entanglements. The categories we create such as nature versus culture, high versus low collapse when you look at the origins. Here, I think of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s climate histories: everything is planetary and interconnected.

Boris Magrini: Just as you mix varied and often contrasting materials in your sculptures, you also pay close attention to colours and how they interact with each other. This ranges from the vibrant, semi-transparent colours of plastic surfaces and LED lights to the more natural colours of organic materials, wood, leaves, rusted metal surfaces and water basins. Exhibitions such as I must alter myself into a life-form which can exist on this planet (2023) and Snailing (Slippy Slimy Slug Slut) (2024) are exemplary in this respect. How do you approach these formal elements in your work?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Colours seduce, they shape our moods, our emotions. I use them deliberately because they alter how we feel, how we perceive. Neon and fluorescent hues, like those of the deep sea, reveal organisms that communicate with light in total darkness. For me, colour is not surface decoration but a medium of encounter. Fluorescent pinks or toxic greens are both beautiful and unsettling. They remind us that perception itself is a fragile contract.

Boris Magrini: Some of the artefacts that you incorporate into your sculptures, installations and video works have significant cultural value and history. Examples include the obsidian stone you found in the mountains of Iceland after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Obsidian (2014), stones from Kandahar in Taliban Last Stand (2013/14), and a fallen tree used in the living sculpture and video Brakfesten – La Grande Bouffe (2022/23). How do you integrate the histories of these objects into your narratives?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Stones, trees and fossils are all carriers of deep time. A small stone has lived through millions of years, carrying memories of earth, trauma, violence, survival. I often integrate these materials into my practice, not as props, but as witnesses. They bring a sense of scale: our human life is short, their time is vast. In works like Bodies of Water: I travelled 66 million years to be with you and then you came (2025), or Snail on Me (upcoming 2025), they become mediators between past and future. They hold history, but also point towards regeneration and repair.

Boris Magrini: While your work in institutions focuses on more conceptual topics and world-building approaches, you have also developed an important body of work in public spaces. Here, you create process-oriented and interactive projects, such as: Metrotopie (2011) and Into the Wild (2017-present). These works are closer to artistic activism. Do you believe that art has a stronger and more honourable function outside of institutions?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Projects in public spaces like Metrotopie or Into the Wild are closer to activism. They are processual: growing, eating, building, sharing. I also made a book-manifesto, A Human Reconciliation with Water, Plop, Drop, Slop (2025) which functions as a contract, a legal and poetic proposal for granting rights to non-human entities. These works create conditions where art is less staged and more lived. Outside institutions, art can become water infrastructure, or legal argument, or social practice. That’s important to me.

Boris Magrini: Your institutional work and public interventions both address relevant and pressing topics, offering a critical yet constructive perspective on the exponential progress of science and technology and its implications for our lives and those of other species. How do you think your work has the greatest impact?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Impact is difficult to measure. If I can shift someone’s perspective, create an opening through which they feel connected to a snail, or a stone, or a river then maybe that’s impact. I don’t think art “solves” problems, but it can destabilise opinions, question habits, create empathy. Sometimes it’s enough if someone leaves with a different sense of time, or care, or responsibility.

Boris Magrini: Lastly, could you tell us about your upcoming projects and activities?

Anne Duk Hee Jordan: I’m collaborating with Asian Cultural Council (ACC), M+, Hong Kong and Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM), Karlsruhe on a project in Gwangju, and a new public sculpture in the UK, alongside a dedicated symposium. I will also take part in the Liverpool Biennial, and then join a Schmidt Ocean Institute research vessel in Antarctica for one month to study methane vents and craters. And yes, 2026 is already moving towards the Venice Biennale. In between, I will keep working on living sculptures, barnacles, ponds, Roman concrete and biochar. There’s always another tide coming.