Through the lens of 'techno-somatic' investigation and the tactile gravity of bronze, the Danish visual artist examines the murky intersections of human labor, digital alienation, and the transactional nature of the art object.
The work of Sidsel Meineche Hansen exists at a peculiar, often uncomfortable intersection. It is a space where the slick frictionlessness of the digital world meets the heavy, stubborn reality of somatic experience. For over a decade, the London-based Danish artist has pursued a practice that interrogates how bodies, both virtual and physical, are managed, harvested, and sold within the contemporary industrial complex. Their work does not merely observe these systems; it inhabit them, often adopting the very language of the industries it critiques, from the 'minimum viable product' of the tech startup to the 'end-user agreements' of software licensing. In doing so, Hansen forces a confrontation with the transactional politics that govern our daily interactions, whether we are engaging with a smartphone, a sex robot, or a work of art.
At Edition Solenne, this investigation takes a material form that feels both ancient and cutting-edge. By working in bronze, Hansen taps into a lineage of sculpture that stretches back millennia, yet the subjects remain stubbornly rooted in the present moment of late-stage capitalism. There is a specific gravity to these objects, a weight that serves as a physical counterpoint to the nebulous nature of the digital economy. While Hansen's oeuvre includes CGI animation, video, and virtual reality, their collaboration with the gallery focuses on the 'dead' weight of the object, exploring how a physical artifact can act as a record of labor, a placeholder for value, and a site of resistance against the erasure of the body.
Origins and the Techno-Somatic
Born in 1981 in Denmark, Sidsel Meineche Hansen has built a career that defies easy categorization, weaving together disciplines that range from woodcuts and textiles to complex robotic engineering. Their education and early practice were marked by an interest in the structural power dynamics of the art world, but this soon expanded into a broader critique of how technology contributes toward upholding patriarchy and capitalist exploitation. Hansen often describes their approach as a 'techno-somatic' investigation, a term that highlights the inextricable link between the technological systems we use and the physical bodies we inhabit. This is not a speculative or theoretical interest; it is a grounded, materialist inquiry into how human labor is formatted and processed by the gaming, pornographic, and tech industries.
The term 'techno-somatic' also suggests a specific kind of internal experience. It is about how the body feels under the pressure of these systems. In their early work, this often manifested in investigations of the avatar, the digital double that acts as a proxy for the human in virtual spaces. Hansen explored the virtual world of Oculus Rift and 3D avatars not as a site of techno-utopian freedom, but as a space of supposed potential sexual freedom that remained bound by physical and legal restrictions. These works asked: who owns the digital body? If an avatar is harmed or exploited, who feels the trauma? By centering the body in these discussions, Hansen rejects the Silicon Valley fantasy of humans and robots merging into a seamless, post-biological existence. Instead, they insist on the biological reality of the worker and the historical reality of 'forced labor,' a concept embedded in the very etymology of the word 'robot.'
The Practice: Managing the Minimum Viable Product
In 2020, Hansen was awarded a Turner Prize bursary from Tate Britain, a recognition of their significant contribution to contemporary art through works like 'Welcome to End-Used City' at Chisenhale Gallery. This exhibition, along with others at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and Bergen Kunsthall, showcased Hansen's ability to map the invisible economic processes that sustain the art market. Their practice often involves a degree of institutional critique that goes beyond mere observation. For their 2018 exhibition 'End-user,' Hansen collaborated with three institutions, Kunsthal Aarhus, KW in Berlin, and SMK in Copenhagen, to contribute toward the production of a sex robot prototype made available for pre-order. This project encapsulated many of Hansen's core concerns: the commodification of intimacy, the hierarchy of the art market, and the ways in which cultural capital is fixed by the end-user, usually an institution or a private collector.
I wanted to consider what kind of service I was expected to provide. I also wanted to think about sex as the nexus of art market value.
This notion of the 'end-user' is central to understanding Hansen's perspective. In the tech world, the end-user is the person for whom a product is designed, but Hansen suggests that in the art world, the artist is often the one providing a service to the end-user, who ultimately reaps the return on investment. The 'minimum viable product,' another term borrowed from tech, becomes a placeholder for a future commodity, a way of managing value before the object has even reached its final form. Hansen's work frequently incorporates these transactional frameworks, such as the pre-order form or the end-user agreement, as a way to police the relationship they have with their work. This is a response to the resentment that can arise from selling art, a process that involves a loss of control and a separation from the affective ties the artist has developed with the work during its creation.
References and Materiality
Material honesty is a hallmark of Hansen's physical sculptures. Whether working with silicon, wood, or metal, they allow the material to speak its own history. In the series 'Hollow Eyed' (2017), Hansen used silicon-metal to create sculptures that look like a cross between emojis and death masks. These pieces were originally part of an installation that documented the foundry where they were cast, the Maybrey Foundry, making the link between the art object and industrial manufacture explicit. The sculptures were designed to be activated by a facial-recognition app, referencing the depersonalization of work in the current service economy. Yet, when viewed as stand-alone objects, their surfaces reveal something more human: wrinkle-like cracks, fingerprints, and variations in oxidation that disrupt the illusion of mass production.
In a 2022 interview with ArtReview, Hansen noted that they associate aesthetic perfection with an erasure of the labor that goes into capitalist production. This philosophy is evident in their use of bronze. Unlike the high-gloss, pristine finish often sought in luxury design, Hansen’s bronzes frequently exhibit a 'rough' or 'misshapen' quality. These are not accidents but purposeful details that record the physical hand of the artist and the industrial process of the foundry. By rejecting the 'monad' view of objects as isolated and self-sufficient entities, Hansen invites the viewer to look closer at the history and context of the material environment. Every dent, every etched engraving, and every variation in patina is a mark of labor that refuses to be erased.
In Conversation: The Zombie-Sex Robot
Hansen's discussions with curators like Anna Gritz reveal the darker, more speculative side of their practice. One of the most provocative concepts they have explored is that of the 'zombie-sex robot.' This idea emerged from an interest in how sex dolls are being marketed and used not just as sexual tools but as data harvesters. Hansen notes that specialized brothels are opening across Europe that use these dolls as a physical medium for pornography, creating a legal framework where the interaction between human and doll is classified as sex work. In this context, the robot becomes a 'zombie,' a dead body reanimated by the owner’s data and desires.
I’m working on a zombie-sex robot. ... I became interested in the idea of the sex robot as a data harvester and zombie whose dead body could be reanimated by its owner or clients.
This reversal of roles is a key theme for Hansen. Normally, emotional labor is provided by the human sex worker; here, the client's emotional, verbal, or violent interactions with the robot are harvested as data by the corporation that owns the AI. This process allows the market to get as intimate with the consumer as the consumer gets with the robot. Hansen’s critique extends to the culture of Silicon Valley, which they describe as transhumanist and emancipatory but ultimately rooted in a colonial logic of forced labor. By producing these objects within the framework of the art market, Hansen highlights how our own fantasies of technology and intimacy are being commodified.
The Works with Edition Solenne: Dead Bell
The collaboration between Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Edition Solenne brings these complex themes into a singular, tactile form: the 2022 sculpture titled 'Dead Bell.' Cast in a dark red patinated bronze, the work is a formidable presence, measuring 28,5 x 22 x 10 cm. At first glance, it is a piece of skilled craftsmanship, but a closer inspection reveals the 'techno-somatic' tensions that define Hansen’s practice. The bell is intentionally misshapen, its surface marked by dents and irregularities that suggest a history of use, or perhaps a violent silencing. It is a bell that cannot ring, or one that rings for a dead system, a physical record of weight and gravity that will outlast the viewer.
The choice of material, bronze, is significant. Bronze holds a level of detail that few other mediums can achieve, and it carries the weight of history in its very composition. Each edition of 'Dead Bell' was produced at the renowned Fonderia Artistica Mariani in Italy, an art foundry established in 1952. Using the traditional lost-wax and vacuum-shell methods, the foundry captured the finest surface details of Hansen's original model. In the lost-wax process, the artist’s original is captured in a flexible mould, a hollow wax replica is refined, and then encased in ceramic. The wax is fired out, and molten bronze is poured into the void. This sequence ensures that the final metal piece is a physical record of the hand that made it, hardened into an alloy of endurance.
The 'deadness' of the bell is not just metaphorical. In Hansen’s lexicon, it refers to the status of the commodity and the erasure of life through labor. The dark red patina, achieved through heat and chemical reaction, gives the sculpture a fleshly, bruised quality, connecting it back to the artist's interest in the somatic body. There is a faintly etched engraving on the surface, a detail that encourages the viewer to lean in, to touch, and to question the story behind the object. Who rang this bell? Why is it dented? By posing these questions, Hansen disrupts the passive consumption of art. The visitor is no longer just a viewer; they are forced to confront the object as a carrier of hidden narratives and industrial labor.
Finally, 'Dead Bell' serves as a unique sculpture within a collection because of the individual variations in its finish. While it is a limited edition of 30, the hand-applied patina and the manual chasing of the metal ensure that each piece is one-of-a-kind. It exists as a 'collector work,' placed privately in conversation with the gallery, mirroring the way Hansen uses their art to navigate the relational politics of the market. It is an object that embodies the tension between the 'end-user' and the creator, a silent signifier of the opaque nature of capitalist production that refuses to be a simple, 'fuckable' or subservient product. It is heavy, it is silent, and it is undeniably real.
Closing: A Record of Silence
Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s work serves as a necessary friction in an increasingly digitized world. By grounding their critique of technology, labor, and sex in the heavy, unyielding medium of bronze, they ensure that their investigations cannot be easily dismissed or scrolled past. The works made with Edition Solenne are not mere decorations; they are 'techno-somatic' artifacts that record the presence of the body within the machines of the market. They remind us that behind every digital interface, every 'minimum viable product,' and every automated service, there is a history of labor, an individual body, and a physical reality that demands to be acknowledged.
In the end, 'Dead Bell' and the broader oeuvre of Hansen suggest that the only way to resist the depersonalization of the modern economy is to look closer at the material surfaces of our environment. By making the invisibility of capitalist production visible, and by giving weight to the 'dead' silence of the commodity, Hansen offers us a way to think deeper about the art around us and the systems that shape our lives. Their practice is a testament to the power of the object to act as both a placeholder for value and a site of profound, silent defiance.
