All Together Now

All Together Now at Kunsten, featuring Mille Kalsmose's installation Cosmic Family. This comprehensive showcase of Danish contemporary art is anchored by Kalsmose's exploration of alternative family relationships, part of a significant donation to Kunsten from Margit and Jens Haven Christiansen. Supported by the Ny Carlsberg Fondet, including the acquisition of Kalsmose's work by the New Carlsberg Foundation, the exhibition unites diverse perspectives on today's world through drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations. Kalsmose's work focuses on its introspective approach to societal norms and human connections, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of modern life.

Cosmic Family explores themes of personal identity and the connections between self, family, and the cosmos. The iron figures, with their anthropomorphic forms, can be associated with family members of varying heights and shapes. They are arranged in elliptical orbits above curved metal and wooden floor pieces, imitating the course of our planets and the rings of Saturn. At the center of the installation, a speaker emits sounds derived from radio and plasma waves recorded by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft near Saturn's rings. The incorporation of harmonious sounds stems from the idea of a cosmos created through harmonious proportions.

The installation combines industrial and archaeological elements, connecting human transience with the profound continuity of the Earth. Kalsmose works with materials that extend across multiple temporalities and thereby reflect how we are connected to larger cycles of existence.

The work explores family not only as a social unit but as a metaphysical one. It gestures toward speculative pasts and futures—moments when matter, memory, and relationships merge into form. The installation becomes a kind of time-instrument, sounding into the unknown while listening back through geological and cultural time. Rather than separating scientific knowledge from emotional truth, the work suggests that identity is neither fixed nor isolated but shaped by everything around and before us. It reminds us that we are part of systems we both form and are formed by—and that listening, at its deepest, is an act of relational recognition across distance, scale, and time.