Acting Potential
26 March – 13 August 2026
Group show at Politikens Forhal / Medicinsk Museion, Copenhagen.
Photos: David Stjernholm
Acting Potential, 2025
Aluminium cast and glazed ceramic sphere with digital print
Davide Hjort di Fabio’s sculpture consists of two interconnected elements: a thin, upright aluminium sculpture created from a 3D scan of the artist’s arm, and a ceramic sphere with a harlequin pattern. The sculpture creates an interplay between aluminium, often used in the hidden structures of buildings, and Harlequin, a playful and ever-shifting character from commedia dell’arte. In this way, Di Fabio explores the stem cell as a kind of biological trickster, highlighting the body’s potential for transformation. The scanned arm points to a key site where patients receive blood during stem cell transplantations, grounding the work in lived experiences of medical treatment, while also pointing to the vulnerability of bodies shaped by frontier technologies over time.
The work is inspired by British biologist C. H. Waddington’s epigenetic landscape from 1957, showing a ball-like cell moving across a hilly terrain. The landscape’s hills and valleys represent the genetic and environmental influences shaping a stem cell’s differentiation into different cell types. Di Fabio translates this scientific model into sculptural form, suggesting a body in motion, suspended between different possible states and not yet fully defined.
Moving between scientific and poetic metaphors, the sculpture appears simultaneously as body, landscape, and process of becoming.
Curator: Pernille Lystlund Matzen
Research and Additional Curation: Louise Whiteley
Exhibiting Artists: Charlotte Jarvis, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Davide Hjort di Fabio, Jens Settergren
Special thanks to researchers: Tine Friis, Agnete Kirkeby, Alison Salvador, Maxy Stoetzel, Joshua Brickman.