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Press release: Angela Gram Solo Show: Absolute Elsewhere “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” - Charles Darwin
Human beings have always moved toward the impossible. We have crossed oceans, climbed Mount Everest, raced to reach the poles first, and sent humans to the moon. Not because it was necessary, but because it was possible. It is in our nature to push boundaries and challenge what seems impossible.
Today we see the same drive in the attempt to bring extinct species back to life. The question is why. Is it the pursuit of progress, of legacy, or the desire to overcome the finality of time and, ultimately, to defy death itself?
Absolute Elsewhere is Angela Gram’s fourth solo exhibition at Gallery Poulsen. In this new series of paintings, she explores some of the most radical scientific experiments of our time, shifting global power structures, and climate change, expressed through the symbolic language of nature and wild animals.
Throughout her career, Angela Gram has explored the tension between fiction and reality, the natural world and the human-made, the past and the future. She repeatedly returns to questions about how our reality changes, how ecosystems shift, and how species disappear. Her paintings have served as a form of documentation of endangered species, showing images of life that future generations may never see.
Now we live in a time when reality overtakes fiction. Extinct species can be brought back through biotechnological interventions. What is recreated is not always a return to the original, but rather a curation of life. When DNA is incomplete and must be supplemented, hybrids emerge that appear almost mythological – larger, stronger beings from a time we have never experienced.
Just because we can, does it mean we should? If we can control evolution, can we also try to control our own mortality and achieve eternal life?
The same drive that makes us bring back extinct species also pushes nations to war, ideologies into conflict, and civilization to reshape the planet’s climate. In a world marked by war in Europe, fragile peace negotiations, and shifting ecosystems, the question of cost and responsibility becomes more urgent. Who pays for progress? And what happens when the balance of nature is disrupted faster than it can recover?
Absolute Elsewhere unfolds in this tension. The exhibition examines the limits of human intervention. Just because we can, does not mean we should. What is the cost of our drive toward the impossible – for nature, for animals, and for our civilization? When we push the limits of evolution, war, and climate, we must ask who pays the price.
Do we still need to protect nature if we can recreate it? What does it mean to be able to create and take life? And is what we call recreation really a reconstruction?
At the same time, rapid technological development pushes what was once myth or fiction into reality. If we can bring back the extinct, what limits should we set? Could we one day create something that has never existed, such as unicorns, or bring back predators from the past like in Jurassic Park?
Absolute Elsewhere asks how far we can go and what the cost of our curiosity, ambition, and desire for control is for both nature and ourselves.
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