Galleri Nicolai Wallner is pleased to present ‘Interoceptions’, a solo exhibition by Jesper Just, opening August 22, 2025.

The exhibition takes its title from the solitary video installation work in the gallery space, a piece born from Just’s focus on forest as a site for reassessing relations around technology, identity, and the vegetal. ‘Interoceptions’ was premiered at the Lyon Biennial in 2024.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is met with undulating sonic landscapes of wooden wind instruments. A six-metre-wide LED projection screen strikes a three-quarter stance, exposing its technological and architectural body. The installation’s large wooden structure takes an industrially processed form of the forest – laminated timber – and presents the forest inverted.

View the video here.

The cinematic representation of the forest, supported by its own exposed anatomy turned inside out and reconfigured, mirrors the sensation of interoception – the body’s ability to sense, interpret, and integrate signals from within. This internal system, through which we perceive states such as hunger, thirst, or pain, is fundamental to regulating the body and shaping emotional and adaptive responses. In Just’s installation, this inner sensing becomes a metaphor for how the forest’s hidden processes are made perceptible, turning the viewer’s gaze inward as much as outward.

The film carries the audience slowly through the forest. As time passes, lights shift not into familiar sunsets and sunrises but cooler, glowing pockets of violet and white which seem to emerge from within the trees themselves. The sounds of drawn-out organ chords intensify and fall with the forests’ breath, as the layers concentrate and recede through time and space.

Each scene holds within it the same stretch of forest captured six times, layered onto one another. First filmed in daylight, then re-filmed five more times in hour intervals until the forest is enveloped in complete darkness, the depths of the forest are exposed by infrared light. In these six different light environments, morning fades into night, daylight shifts into night vision. Six timescapes of the same forest are collapsed and recomposed, performing a panoramic time machine.

These six layers refer to an earlier work titled ‘The Garden in the Machine (2022)’ in which Just collaborated closely with a singular tree, which dictates the degree of visibility of each layer based on its current state of water intake, light intake, temperature, growth, movement and photosynthesis. The video is then projected on LED screens which wrap around the entirety of a building at the Aarhus Film City.

Over the last few years, the artist Jesper Just has been questioning and probing our societal entanglements and disentanglements between natural and digital techniques. In 2021, Just began incorporating the mechanics of the exhibition and the cinematic with that of cultivation. ‘Seminarium (2021)’, developed technological integrations into his film installations where video projections actively grew plants within the exhibition. Bodies were filmed under infrared light, which when projected with LED screens, nurtured the plants in front of them with the exact kind of light needed for them to grow. This was the first work where Just created an exchange between his films and plant life.

‘Interoceptions’ continues the line of integrating biorhythms into Jesper Just’s cinematic practice, and learning from plant-thinking. Moving the Anthropocene and structured narrative further from the centre not only investigates our standing with the plant world, but pulls into the forefront an existential understanding held within the poetics of plant consciousness.

Jesper Just (b. 1974, Denmark) has shown extensively around the world, representing Denmark at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and with other notable solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Den Haag (The Hague), Des Moines Art Centre (Des Moines), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), ARoS (Aarhus), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (South Korea), as well as with the Perform15 performance biennial in Times Square (New York). In 2017, Just worked alongside the Royal Danish Ballet to create an original composition. In 2018, he opened another ballet with the American Ballet Theatre at Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York). His work can be found in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), Musée d’Art Moderne (Luxembourg), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), the National Gallery of Denmark (Copenhagen), Arken Museum (Ishøj), ARoS (Aarhus), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk) and Heart Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning) among many others.

‘Interoceptions’ credits:
Soundscapes by August Rosenbaum
Production by Anna Lena Films and Good Company Pictures
With support from The Danish Arts Foundation