Can Art Reach Us Where Facts No Longer Can?

Relationships to climate activism are getting more complicated, and the information we take in is becoming genuinely harder to trust. PHI is asking whether art might be better equipped than argument to navigate both, with two wildly different exhibitions this summer that approach the same question from opposite ends.

On one side, Paola Pivi's feathered polar bears, a miniature Statue of Liberty wearing a digital emoticon mask, and a black box room lined with 92 screens cycling through deceptively mundane open-source imagery while a voice calmly recites lies. On the other is Jakob Kudsk Steensen's immersive worlds built from places most of us will never see: collapsing glaciers, volcanic seafloors, forests where abandoned tourist resorts are slowly being swallowed back into the earth.

Above: Paola Pivi (left) and Jakob Kudsk Steensen (right). | Photograph: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio (left) & Ériver Hijano (right)

The pairing is by design. PHI's programming committee works roughly eighteen months out, guided less by institutional instinct than by what artists are actually doing. "It's artists and the public who decide what's pertinent, we just need to listen," says Cheryl Sim, PHI's Director and Chief Curator. When Pivi and Steensen both surfaced for the 2026 season, the curatorial question wasn't whether to show them together but what that conversation might unlock.

"They both grapple with the built and natural worlds and ultimately there's concern, and there's desire, to have real connection with these things."

Sim invited Kanika Anand, Senior Curator at Contemporary Calgary, to bring the Pivi exhibition to Montreal. When Pivi visited PHI's main space of one large open room with none of the walls she typically uses to organize series, she was pushed to rethink the work's architecture entirely. That reckoning made room for Lies.

Paola Pivi, It’s me, 2022. Bronze (Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan), fiberglass mask. Photo: Blaine Campbell. | Photograph: Paola Pivi & Perrotin. This work relates to a larger sculpture You know who I am, 2022, commissioned by The High Line, New York.

Having its Canadian premiere at PHI, Lies (2018–2026) was never part of the Calgary iteration. The piece originated in something specific: a four-year legal battle Pivi fought over the adoption of her son, during which a powerful institution deployed fabricated information against her family. "She began to believe: did this happen?" recalls Anand. "It really messed with her sense of real and unreal."

Inside the installation, 92 screens cycle through mundane open-source imagery every three seconds—tourist snapshots, street photographs, pictures of flowers—while a recorded voice reads lies aloud. Some are absurd (chocolate milk comes from brown cows), some locally planted (the orange construction cone is Montreal's official symbol), some pointed enough that you're not sure whether to laugh. The effect is less a meditation on dishonesty than a portrait of the information environment we've all agreed to live inside.

"Lies are so normalized today," Anand says, "that you don't really see them anymore. It's just become normal."

Pivi's broader practice works this way: beauty and humour as entry point, complexity as destination. She refuses didactic wall text on principle. "You sort of make what you want from the work," as Anand puts it, and she programs with the same instinct. "80% of what makes an exhibition impactful is whether you've touched the right chords with the people visiting."

Daniel Fiset, who has worked at PHI for close to fifteen years and curated Otherworlds, applies pressure to a different nerve. Steensen's fieldwork in collapsing glaciers, experimental forests, abandoned resorts, and volcanic seafloors becomes in his hands not documentation but raw material: "a springboard for exercises in fiction" that sits at the border of record and imagination without settling into either.

The approach, Fiset argues, matters because the standard documentary mode of engaging with climate change has limits. "He's looking at it from a slightly different angle," one drawn from video games, where the player has agency, can choose direction, modify the world, dream alternate outcomes. The exhibition, Steensen's first major survey, is designed around that logic: no prescribed route, no single correct sequence.

"It's a possible way out of eco-anxiety," Fiset says, "geared towards agency and dreaming, rather than the passive weight of anxiety washing all over you."

Psychosphere (2025), having its North American premiere here, was originally commissioned for a subterranean water reservoir in Copenhagen. At PHI, Steensen and his team rebuilt it around sound with two rooms calibrated to echo each other with a precision the original cavernous space wouldn't allow. Inside, blown glass, resin, and fiberglass lamps oscillate as field recordings, accordion, and drone synthesizers layer into something Sim describes as a distinct frequency, a vibration you feel as much as hear.

The work is anchored physically by real materials: cedar mulch, volcanic ash, traces of the environments Steensen has moved through, a reminder that immersive technology is never as dematerialized as it seems. Fiset has seen it dozens of times and it still surprises him, which he credits to Steensen's insistence on maintaining a blurring line between fact and imagination even with his closest collaborators.

The curator's job, Sim says, is not to close off meaning but to translate the artist's questions and provide entry points. "Our job is to translate from the artist to the public: a sense of why this, what you can glean from this, why it matters now, without closing off meaning for you."

Both exhibitions resist the easiest available responses to the problems they're circling: paralysis in the face of climate collapse, numbness in the face of constant misinformation. What they offer instead is something rarer: the experience of sitting with difficult things long enough for your own thinking to catch up.

---

Paola Pivi: Come check it out. Lies lies lies and Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Otherworlds are on view at PHI through September 13. Tickets at phi.ca.