The Danish artists’ collective SUPERFLEX is presenting Come Hell or High Water at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Ishøj, Denmark. Spanning more than three decades of practice since the trio's formation in 1993, the exhibition imagines a distant future in which rising sea levels caused by climate change have submerged the museum. In this speculative scenario, the museum is transformed into a vast ark, where humans and other forms of life can coexist. Blue lighting, sandbags, and barricades at the entrance evoke the atmosphere of a museum sunk deep beneath the sea. Scattered throughout the exhibition, shipping crates contain works ranging from SUPERFLEX’s early pieces to its most recent productions, functioning both as an archive of past projects and as cargo to be carried into the future. 

In recent years, SUPERFLEX has been developing structures that function simultaneously as artworks and habitats for marine life. At the center of the exhibition, the trio presents The Ark Factory, an ongoing project that produces components for larger ark. Using a specialized technology involving ice, SUPERFLEX creates artificial reef structures designed to serve as habitats for marine organisms. Visitors can observe firsthand the process of constructing a fragment of this immense ark. These structures will be installed beneath the sea afterwards, embodying SUPERFLEX’s broader practice of exploring possibilities for coexistence among diverse forms of life beyond the human.

Alongside these installations, three video works explore migration, borders, environmental issues, and survival through the motif of the sea. Kwassa Kwassa (2015) follows the production of fiberglass boats used for fishing and the smuggling of migrants in the Comoros archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The work reveals the precarious realities of migrants forced to undertake dangerous journeys, while exposing the political tensions surrounding borders. Two Suns (2024) draws on the history of the 67 nuclear bomb tests conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific between 1946 and 1958. The title refers to the recollection of a survivor who described the explosion as resembling “two suns in the sky.” Meanwhile, All Is Water (2023) uses AI-generated narration to imagine the consciousness of a fish, connecting to the perspective of another species and moving beyond an anthropocentric worldview.

Through these works, Come Hell or High Water examines environmental and social issues through the sea, offering a critical perspective on power structures within the global economic system and contemporary modes of production and labor. At the same time, the exhibition explores ways in which human and nonhuman life might coexist in an ever-changing world. Particularly, The Ark Factory brings the actual construction of the ark into the exhibition space, extending art beyond speculation about the future and toward concrete action for ecological coexistence. Throughout its practice, SUPERFLEX has engaged with social and political issues while challenging the boundaries between art and practical tools. With this exhibition, the trio asks what we will choose to preserve and leave behind amid the ecological transformations to come and proposes collaboration and collective action as essential responses to the climate crisis.