Madeleine Andersson, 10K VIRGIN BRAINS, 2024. Photo: David Stjernholm.
In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our world, what distinguishes genuine intelligence from its absence? Andersson's 10K VIRGIN BRAINS confronts this question through thousands of white plastic containers that occupy Kunsthall Trondheim, mirroring The Brain Collection at the University of Southern Denmark—a repository of over 9,479 brains extracted from patients predominantly diagnosed with mental illnesses.
These containers form an eerie labyrinthine installation throughout the Kunsthall's sublevel basement galleries, inhabited by animated lab gloves that reach into the space like disembodied hands emerging through walls. Within these haunted corridors, visitors repeatedly encounter fragments of a video essay distributed across multiple screens, where the artist weaves together medical documentation with contemporary media artifacts from horror's collective unconscious. The work deconstructs and parodies the supposed objectivity of scientific inquiry into consciousness, the ethics of medical experimentation, and the very nature of life itself.
10K VIRGIN BRAINS was developed with O-Overgaden in Copenhagen and Index in Stockholm.