THERE’S LIFE INSIDE
by Stine Deja

23.05.26 - 23.08.26

In the exhibition There’s Life Inside, the viewer is observed by digital beings encased in brushed aluminium structures that contrast with Regelbau 411's eroded concrete surfaces.

Like the swallows that now build nests within the bunker’s interior, these artificial presences have found their way into a space originally designed for survival and surveillance. Here, the bunker is transformed from a historical shelter into a kind of observational laboratory. But who is really observing whom?

Stine Deja engages with the technological acceleration of our time, in which developments in artificial intelligence, humanoid service robots, and reproductive technologies challenge established understandings of identity, body, genetics and inheritance. The exhibition reflects on a moment when AI is becoming an increasingly integrated part of everyday life, and digital assistants are trained to understand our voices, habits, and desires.

Integrated with dark humour, Deja points to contemporary questions surrounding life, intelligence, and humanity’s desire to create something in its own image. The exhibition draws inspiration in part from psychologist Albert Bandura’s famous Bobo Doll experiments from 1961, which explored how behaviour is learned through imitation. In the experiments, children repeated the aggressive actions they had observed adults directing toward a doll – a reminder of how behaviour can be reproduced and reinforced. Today, the question can be asked again: What exactly are we teaching our technologies? And what are they teaching us in return?

There’s Life Inside engages with some of the most widely debated issues of our time, while also drawing connections to enduring philosophical questions about the origins of life and the nature of consciousness. Can artificial beings develop consciousness – or even a soul? And if they can, what might that reveal about ourselves?