Theodor Nymark

Diversione

6 March–4 April 2026
Grønlandsleiret 47C, 0190 Oslo.

“Of the vivid natural environment, today only a distant, fleeting memory remains — a melancholic semblance glimpsed within symbolic frames, like paintings or phone screens, or in physical ones, strolling through the domesticated nature of elegant city gardens, private or aristocratic.”¹

Diversione takes its point of departure in a residency at the Danish Institute in Rome. Emerging from research into landscape painting, urban theory and the historical layering of cultivated space, the exhibition considers diversion as detour and displacement, between image and site, memory and intervention.

The exhibition is accompanied by texts by Nikolaj Schultz, Assistant Professor of Social Theory and Ecological Thought at Aarhus School of Architecture, and writer Matteo Giovanelli.

Another Human Reflection

Even if I promised to keep this text short, I will begin with an anecdote. Some months before accepting to write this piece, I found myself in Venice, trying to navigate my way through the city to get to a meeting, as the heat suddenly intensified. The city’s thick stonewall skeleton seemed to amplify the twenty-something degrees, making it feel like thirty or more. It was hot, I was tired and my legs were heavy, yet I had to keep going. But, the problem was that almost every turn I took seemed wrong, each corner leading to yet another dead end, yet another face-to-face encounter with a canal. First, I turned right, then I took a left, but somehow it brought me back to where I was before, staring at the waters as I had done minutes earlier.

Yes, I was lost in this mythic stone maze – but I was so in different way than before. Why? Well, because whilst standing there, catching my breath and gazing at the water in the canal, I could not help but feel that it somehow reflected me differently than it had the last time I was there, years earlier. Today, I pondered, you see yourself mirrored in this famous lagoon not because the waters are clear, but because they are dirty, and because they are rising, due to your own being, being there. A human, a tourist among thousands, perhaps arriving on a CO2 emitting airplane, polluting the lagoon, and slowly making an ecologically threatened Venice sink…

Walking away, trying again to find my way, it seemed pretty clear to me that the old saying “There are no ends to Venice” really depends on what sort of ends you are looking for. In fact, as far as I could see, there was nothing but ends there. One realisation is that Venice literally is sinking under the pressure of climate change and mass tourism. Another is that by being a person visiting this about-to-be-washed-away place, I was a participant in such endings. And hence, I also had to confront myself with one idea of my ‘subjectivity’ washing away, as Foucault had it coming, whilst another was one coming onto shore. “I am other”, said Rimbaud – “Venice is other” responded Sartre. But held up against the waters, the lesson was rather that I am other, because Venice is other – and because its new and partly destroyed form takes shape after me and my actions.

The point here is not only how “ecological problems” follow us all in our footsteps, whenever we are, wherever we go or whatever we do. What I hope is clear by now, is how it also illustrates howthe very condition of the human being has transformed into another sort of being and another sort of existence than we thought it was. It has turned into a figure that drags a set of destructive traces behind it, traces that it is constantly reminded of. Or, put differently: the human – that subject we thought was somehow beyond its object-Heimat, or planet – now seems to cast another set of shadows. Shadows that unfortunately remain, no matter how much we look the other direction, destabilising the very life conditions of its own species-Being.

Yes, it’s a double mutation, a double metamorphosis, that we are facing today – one in which both “the world” that we thought we knew, and “the human” itself, are transforming in a strange, confusing and alarming manner. Why “the world”? Because we are realising that the planet we live on – and that we thought of as stable until very recently – is reacting to our collective human actions, to a level that threatens its habitability. Why “the human”? Because by being the very reason or cause behind this planetary metamorphosis, the shape or silhouette of “the human” itself has turned into a different sort of being. Again, as mentioned above, it’s not a choice between “I am other” or “the world is other”. It’s rather “I am other because the world is other” – and because I am making it so, on a planetary level.

And hence the significance of Theodor Nymark’s exhibition, since it strikes me as engagingprecisely these sorts of curiosities related to the human being’s traces being mirrored in another way, in another world, today. A quick step back, and a reminder: I am neither art scholar nor an art critic, so it isn’t my job to evaluate the aesthetic quality of what is at stake here. However, what I nonetheless do dare to state and qualify is that the exhibition takes up points of inquiry that I today consider be as important to philosophy as they are to the arts. Which questions, again? Questions like: What is perishable and ephemeral and what is not, both regarding the world and when it comes to being human? What is the world, when it is reflects human traces in another manner than before? And: what is a human, when it is realises that it is reflected in the world differently than it used to be? Tough questions, that’s true – but not questions that are going to perish themselves any time soon.

Nikolaj Schultz, Assistant Professor of Social Theory and Ecological Thought, Aarhus School of Architecture.

Landscape has always been a victim of physical, theoretical and visual circumscription For centuries it has endured terminological constraints, definitions, yet it has remained one of the privileged subjects of art history, through its mimetic capacity to render it as an image. Art has a longstanding familiarity with this genre: from imaginative landscapes that framed classical scenes, to the eighteenth century capricci, from the realistic views, such as Canaletto’s meticulously detailed grand vistas, to the Romantic sublime and the atmospheric picturesque.

Of the vivid natural environment, today only a distant, fleeting memory remains — a melancholic semblance glimpsed within symbolic frames, like paintings or phone screens, or in physical ones, strolling through the domesticated nature of elegant city gardens, private or aristocratic. It is precisely these places — spatial realms defined by human intervention — that are emblematic examples of historical and cultural layering, true hortus conclusus that preserves the last gentle trace of a nature that has become suspended, tamed and hybrid: flourishing where it can, spontaneous only when induced. Here accumulate shelves of dusty natural memories, ecosystems woven from stories and casual encounters, ruins and artistic forms: a pile of traces and meanings that loom over the contemporary individual.

In Theodor Nymark’s work, however, faded recollections of a primordial and triumphant nature flow, now degraded at a symbolic state, deprived of authenticity, like decoration or a trinket. During his stay in Rome at the Danish Academy, the artist immersed himself in the courtly gardens of villas and palaces, succumbing to their romantic and enchanted allure. Walking within them retracing the steps of Golden Age Danish artists — such as Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg or Thorald Læssøe — he observed the garden and its archival overlays for what they truly are, without being overwhelmed by its palimpsestic impressiveness.

Confronted with the weight of history in Villa Borghese, the artist chooses to intervene in this suspended place, furtively marking its main elements — the trees, the statue of Pushkin and the fountain, also known from Læssøe’s Fontana Oscura — with luminous, reflective spray paint, which he photographs and displays in the exhibition within polished and chrome-plated aluminium frames, creating a double play of light and reflection. In the garden, he follows the melancholic luminous trajectory of the last natural inhabitant of the darkness. It is a firefly, alone, in a Roman spring night, flying amid the blinding artificial lights that filter between branch and branch, in a confusion that is exaggerated and saturated in a concealed iPhone video.

Nymark plays with this small framed landscape, observing it as a result of human intervention. Thus it becomes a conceptual device and it is transposed into the exhibition spaces of Pachinko. Here, a mirrored floor not only attempts a parallel with the ponds so dear to art history but also reflects awareness of its own staging and packaging. The individual stands naked in front of their own subjugation; yet they are also made responsible and conscious of their own actions. The chaos of lights and reflections generates an atmospheric tension between nature and artifice, from which emerges a hybrid cardboard figure: a Dachshund, a domesticated German hunting dog, turned into an ornament among many, an ironic witness to bourgeois knick-knackery.

Matteo Giovanelli

Fontana Oscura, Villa Borghese, 2025
Reflective powder intervention; iPhone photography, inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper, chrome-plated custom frame with artist-defined passepartout proportions

Alexander Pushkin Monument, Villa Borghese, 2025
Reflective powder intervention; iPhone photography, inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper, chrome-plated custom frame with artist-defined passepartout proportions

Roman Arch of Septimius Sever, Villa Borghese, 2025
Reflective powder intervention; iPhone photography, inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper, chrome-plated custom frame with artist-defined passepartout proportions

Huitfeldts gate, Oslo, 2026
iPhone photography, inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper, chrome-plated custom frame with artist-defined passepartout proportions

Dachshund (Kids Shelf), 2025
Mirror foil on laser-cut MDF

lucciola, 2025
Single-channel iPhone video (inverted), sound, 00:54

Ambient, 2026
Mirror vinyl floor, MDF structure, humidifier with cypress essential oil, shipping box for lampshades with integrated light fixture and lampshade.