Nils Staerk is the latest commercial gallery to spring up amidst the coffee shops and organic wine bars in Nordvest, a district of Copenhagen that the local media are more likely to associate with violent crime and unemployment. A further reminder of the uncomfortable coexistence of two worlds stands directly outside the gallery’s doors, in the shape of a mobile shelter for the homeless. It seems fitting, therefore, that Swedish-Argentinian artist Runo Lagomarsino’s “We Have Been Called Many Names” highlights the invisibility of undocumented migrant workers in the United States. The exhibition consists of an installation of 28 white plaster casts of hats placed on wooden plinths, which occupies most of the gallery’s main room. The hats from which these sculptures have been cast—some made of straw, others the caps worn as part of a uniform—belong to workers in Los Angeles. These cleaners, security guards, gardeners, and service laborers operate on the fringes of American society, with few rights and no voice even as they perform the essential tasks that those from more secure backgrounds might turn their back on. The array of wooden stools that serve as plinths form a square grid through which visitors can walk and inspect the diverse …

Lea Porsager’s solo show at Nils Stærk pulls viewers into a universe “packed with astonishing unheard-of facts, helix patterns and fermionic seeds” through the eyes of #ET. In #ET (all works 2016), a text authored by the artist, Porsager’s extraterrestrial alter ego of sorts takes viewers at full speed through a dense set of references ranging from Rudolf Steiner’s idiosyncratic theories of the ear; a dream by quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli as told to Carl Jung; and the polar energies of Kundalini yoga. By way of these leads, some footnoted, readers weave in and out of the esoteric and the scientific, of personal and artistic experiences, and a thought-flow carried through the multi-dimensional inquiries that Porsager often considers: the entanglement of temporalities, spaces, bodies, and experience in both past and present. Carefully scripted and edited to encompass the synergies and contradictions of myriad research sources, Porsager’s text—a work in its own right, custom-printed on paper—yields its power from a logic that exists outside the rational. Her words unfold as poems coursing with an internal rhythm, igniting an encounter with the other more minimalist components that make up the exhibition. In Twenty-two Ground Protection Mats ~ ET, #ET’s initials are cut out …