Maja Malou Lyse is a Danish multidisciplinary artist whose work examines how images shape desire, identity and power. Born in 1993, she graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 and now lives and works in New York. Moving between video, performance, installation and media interventions, Lyse often places herself before and behind the camera. She draws on television, advertising, tabloids, pornography and social platforms to expose how bodies are represented, consumed and governed. Humour and pop-cultural formats give her research an accessible surface while allowing questions of objectification, consent and self-perception to remain deliberately unsettled.
In 2026 Lyse represents Denmark at the 61st Venice Biennale with Things to Come, presented in the Danish Pavilion from 9 May to 22 November. Developed with curator Chus Martínez, architects Common Accounts and the artist collective DIS, the project brings together a large-scale video and an installation centred on fertility rituals and “sperm races.” Taking scientific research on visual stimuli and sperm motility as a speculative starting point, the exhibition links declining fertility, screen culture, reproductive technology and the instability of images in the age of artificial intelligence. It extends Lyse’s ongoing investigation into how mass media does more than describe reality: it enters the body, organises attention and influences possible futures.