Boy World Effigy II, a major new video and sound work by the artist duo Hart Lëshkina, transforms one of Denmark’s historic choirs, Herning Kirkes Drengekor, into both subject and metaphor, creating a multi-channel video and sound installation that probes the fragile thresholds between individuality and collective order. The work situates the choir as a symbolic institution—steeped in ritual, discipline, and harmony—while exposing the quiet violence of assimilation that underpins collective belonging.
The installation unfolds as a shifting constellation of performance sequences and uncanny constructed fragments drawn from the choirboys’ daily lives. Harmonized voices and synchronized gestures evoke the polish of tradition and cohesion, yet sudden ruptures—discordant tones, unruly movements, moments of defiance—fracture the surface. In these dissonances, the instability of identity and the ambiguity of personal agency within collective structures come into view. The boys’ choir becomes not only a site of sound and movement, but a living prism through which the hierarchies, pressures, and contradictions of collectivity are refracted.
Hart Lëshkina’s fragmented, four-channel composition resists linear narrative. Instead, the work compels viewers to navigate simultaneities and contradictions, destabilizing the boundaries between ritual and reality, authenticity and performance.
At its core, Boy World Effigy II asks urgent questions: Who exerts control within collective performance? Where does power reside—in the conductor’s command, in the synchronized body of the group, or in the individual voice that falters or breaks away? When does imitation become genuine self-expression? These questions echo far beyond the choral tradition, resonating within the mediated landscapes of contemporary media culture, where mimicry, surveillance, and performance shape the contours of identity itself.
By recontextualizing the historic institution of a boys’ choir, Hart Lëshkina illuminates the boundaries that separate harmony from coercion, unity from erasure, performance from authentic selfhood. The installation’s immersive structure resists closure, leaving the audience suspended within the contradictions of collectivity—its comforts and its costs. Boy World Effigy II thus situates itself as a meditation on the precarious conditions of agency and belonging in the present.
Boy World Effigy II will debut on 10 October 2025, as a special exhibition project, curated by Anna Frost, on display at O—Overgaden in Copenhagen, 10–19 October.
Hart Lëshkina is an interdisciplinary artist duo, formed in 2014 by Erik Hart and Tati Lëshkina. Their practice explores the construction of identity, power dynamics, and avatars, moving fluidly between the contexts of art, fashion, and advertising. Working across film, sound, installation, and photography, their work has been exhibited at Spazio Maiocchi (Milan), the Benaki Museum (Athens), and The Community (Paris), among others. In parallel, they have been commissioned by and collaborated with brands, publications, and musicians such as Prada, The New York Times, Charli xcx, Rizzoli, Universal Music, The New Yorker, 070Shake, The Face, Arca, Harper’s Bazaar France, Pop, Clairo, Nike, and many others.
Anna Frost is a Danish curator renowned for her experimental approach to contemporary art and innovative exhibition formats, particularly noted for her work with unconventional exhibition practices and multipurpose spaces. From 2011 to 2017, Frost co-directed the Copenhagen-based space TOVES, curating over 40 exhibitions in Denmark and abroad. In 2019, she co-founded Atrium with Jordan Richman, a curatorial platform staging site-specific interventions in the iconic Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. In 2021, she launched Institute of the Sun, an artist residency and exhibition space where she premiered Uffe Isolotto’s follow-up to his Venice Biennale project and introduced Esben Weile Kjær to the US with a large-scale piece at the Fontainebleau Hotel during Art Basel Miami. She has collaborated with spaces such as The Getty Center, KW, Berlin Biennale 9, PRAXES, Nikolaj Kunsthal, NordicLA, and BFI, been a guest lecturer at Funen Art Academy, and presented masterclasses at YoungArts Foundation, Miami.
The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and Demant Foundation.
