20/09/2026
Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen recently presented his new large-scale painting ‘The Word for World is Forest’ at Det Boglige Hus in Svendborg.
The title refers to Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 science-fiction novel ‘The Word for World is Forest’, as well as to the forest as a living world in its own right. In Havsteen-Mikkelsen’s painting, we find ourselves inside a forest, looking out towards a modernist house. The forest comes before the house - suggesting a shift in perspective: rather than seeing nature as something surrounding and serving human life, we are invited to consider the forest as a world in itself.
The painting consists of 45 individual canvases arranged as a grid, creating a large image that also resembles a screen made up of many smaller screens. Each section is painted individually, using different techniques and degrees of precision. Some areas are expressive, others sharply defined or blurred, creating the sense that several image-realities exist simultaneously.
Throughout the work, a number of “glitches” interrupt the image. Pixels appear where they should not, colours stretch into lines, and in three sections the forest or house appears to be burning. These disruptions introduce another reality into the seemingly peaceful scene - a world in which the climate is changing and nature is no longer simply something we can control or adapt to our needs.
The work explores the tension between the physical and the digital, between the world we experience through our bodies and the many mediated realities we encounter through screens. It ultimately raises a fundamental question: Which world do we live in?
Havsteen-Mikkelsen’s answer points towards the forest - not simply as a landscape, but as a complex world inhabited by countless forms of life. Trees, fungi, insects and microorganisms exist according to different rhythms and conditions than we do, while creating habitats for other species.
As the artist put it in his presentation of the work: “The Word for World is Forest.”
Asmund Havsteen - Mikkelsen
