Inspired by Kunsthal Kongegaarden’s name and history, the Danish artist Hannah Toticki presents her series of ceramic sculptural crowns - an installation format, accompanied by a range of entirely new works created in glazed stoneware, textiles, and plastic.

Exhibition period: 3rd October 2025 – 30th November 2025

The exhibition explores the complex paradox that humans are - on the one hand - the planet’s most powerful species, and our actions carry vast consequences for our own environment and that of other species. On the other hand, we lack full control over our behaviour - both individually and collectively.

Toticki’s ceramic works are often richly coloured, ornate, and deliberately eccentric. Some are glossy and seductive, playing on a commercial product aesthetic designed to spark consumer desire. Others borrow forms from jewellery and accessories, while some verge on the playful or absurd side.

The To Say I Will (At Sige Jeg Vil) exhibition presents absurd titles such as Ruler of the Nervous System, Ruler of the Desert’s Sand, and Ruler of the Migratory Birds’ Lines, where the ceramic crown sculptures highlight duality: human-made changes to landscapes, and climate affects migration routes, yet, we hold no real power over the birds themselves.

Beneath their dazzling polished surfaces, Toticki’s ceramic sculptural crowns grapple with life’s most profound complexities and questions.

One Perspective Among Many: Umwelt
Kunsthal Kongegaarden’s 2025 program takes its starting point from the word Umwelt, a term coined in 1800 by Korsør-born author Jens Baggesen, and later introduced into the German dictionary in 1811.

In 1909, the German biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll used Umwelt to explain why different animals in the same ecosystem respond to different external signals. He distinguished between Umgebung (the objective environment) and Umwelt (the surrounding world), which defined as the subjective selection of elements accessible to a species through its sensory disposition.

Applied to humans, Uexküll argued that Umwelt describes the difference in how each person perceives the world: the specific version of our own reality, allow our senses to access us. The world, therefore, becomes individual from person to person – creating our own “bubble-world.” Every living being possesses a unique sensory apparatus and experiential world. While we share a physical reality with, for instance, the earthworm, our respective Umwelten, in the original sense of the word, may be profoundly different.

Hannah Toticki’s To Say I Will (At Sige Jeg Vil) exhibition similarly reminds us that our human perspectives on the world is only one among many, with a realization that calls for humility, especially in our current time. Each work takes the crown as its symbolic point of departure, abstracted into upward-reaching forms that once pointed toward the God, on whom monarchical power was founded, but which today may also critically question humanity’s belief in itself as a kind of God.

You are invited to the opening of To Say I Will (At Sige Jeg Vil) on Thursday, 2nd October, 2025, from 4–7pm. Opening speeches will begin at 4:45pm.

Supported by: The Danish Arts Foundation, Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen’s Foundation, and Slagelse Municipality.
Kunsthal Konegaarden’s annual program is supported by: The Obelske Foundation