Simian is an independent art center in the district of Ørestad in Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded and run by artists as a non-profit organization, Simian aspires to support and present experimental exhibition projects by national and international artists from emergent and established positions. Through an extensive programme, Simian seeks to engage in critical artistic and social discourses, with the aim to generate discussion, reflection and agency.
This podcast accompanies the exhibition La Légende d’Eer, presenting Iannis Xenakis’ seminal composition (1977) as a spatial installation, restored and remastered from the original tapes. In this episode, music theorist Chris Cutler charts Xenakis’ path from architectural forms to stochastic music, tracing a life shaped by war, exile, and radical creativity.
23 Nov 2025
Mood Curriculum, Episode 5: Saskia Vogel on Peter Cornell's Ways of Paradise
In the fifth and final episode of Mood Curriculum, Kristian Vistrup Madsen meets Saskia Vogel to discuss her translation of Peter Cornell's Ways of Paradise (Fitzcarraldo, 2024). Cornell, who passed away earlier this year, first published the conceptual novel in Swedish in 1987. It presents as the footnotes to a lost manuscript, but what transpires from reading is that searching for ways to paradise will always mean circling the perimeter of a lost object.
23 Nov 2025
Mood Curriculum, Episode 4: Rosanna McLaughlin's Against Morality
In episode four of Mood Curriculum, Kristian Vistrup Madsen is in conversation with Rosanna McLaughlin about her essay Against Morality (Floating Opera Press, 2025). For McLaughlin, morality has become an unconstructive benchmark in art that strips it of its power along with its vitality.
7 Aug 2025
Mood Curriculum, Episode 03: Simon Critchley
Mood Curriculum is a series of podcasts and events curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen that takes as its starting point his essay Mood Over Content, published by Kunstkritikk last year. Mood (Stemning) implies both attunement and resonance; the possible dissolution of the boundary between object and subject. Mood is not information, but inherent to art's own ontology. Here, artwork and practice cannot be separated, but form a unit that necessitates that art's dissemination in itself must be practiced as an art form. What it posits is something at once so obvious and so completely alien as a turn towards aesthetic experience in contemporary art.
In the third episode of Mood Curriculum, I speak with philosopher Simon Critchley about his book On Mysticism (NYRB, 2024). With On Mysticism Critchley offers a roadmap to mystical practice and thought within the Christian tradition. He understands mystical experience as experience in its most intense form – mysticism is mediated immediacy. It is an antidote to melancholy, as Julian of Norwich puts it, "to the heaviness with which the self is attached to itself, riveted to itself. " It is also a call to intensify the senses: "God is all mouth", he quotes from Madame Guyon, and a movement away from the self: to write, in the words of Annie Dillard, "without a face".
7 Aug 2025
Mood Curriculum, Episode 02: Ariana Reines
Mood Curriculum is a series of podcasts and events curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen that takes as its starting point his essay Mood Over Content, published by Kunstkritikk last year. Mood (Stemning) implies both attunement and resonance; the possible dissolution of the boundary between object and subject.
Mood is not information, but inherent to art's own ontology. Here, artwork and practice cannot be separated, but form a unit that necessitates that art's dissemination in itself must be practiced as an art form. What it posits is something at once so obvious and so completely alien as a turn towards aesthetic experience in contemporary art.
In the second episode of Mood Curriculum, I speak with poet Ariana Reines about her book Wave of Blood (Divided, 2024), in which the native properties of poetry are harnessed to reckon with an acute real life crisis during the first months of the war in Gaza. In Wave of Blood there is real grief and anger; it is a challenging and very personal work. It opens with a quote from the poet and painter Etel Adnan that reads: "Science must not replace pain, because when that kind of catastrophe happens, it has no mercy."
7 Aug 2025
Mood Curriculum, Episode 01: J.F. Martel
Mood Curriculum is a series of podcasts and events curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen that takes as its starting point his essay Mood Over Content, published by Kunstkritikk last year. Mood (Stemning) implies both attunement and resonance; the possible dissolution of the boundary between object and subject.
Mood is not information, but inherent to art's own ontology. Here, artwork and practice cannot be separated, but form a unit that necessitates that art's dissemination in itself must be practiced as an art form. What it posits is something at once so obvious and so completely alien as a turn towards aesthetic experience in contemporary art.
In the first episode of Mood Curriculum, JF Martel discusses the re-issue of his 2016 book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. I came across JF in the podcast Weird Studies which he hosts together with Phil Ford. Some of the heroes of the Weirdosphere, as they call it, are Carl Jung, David Lynch, figures from the history of esoteric thought like William James, James Hillman.
JF writes that "If the majority of aesthetic works fails to astonish us ... It may also have something to do with the fact that art ... is constantly being put to uses that are at odds with its essence." Instead, the kinds of objects that Martel is interested in are ones that come closer to the concept of mood: “The work shines from within,” he writes, emitting a “supreme quality that the medieval Scholastics defined as the quidditas or “whatness” of things.”
27 Jun 2025
Local Legends (In Danish)
Nikolaj Stobbe interviews Susanne Ottesen, Michael Thouber, Jesper N. Jørgensen, and Jesper Elg about their experiences founding influential Copenhagen exhibition spaces and redefining the boundaries of art.
27 Jun 2025
The Future is Self-Organized
Stine Hebert moderates Adrian Delafontaine, Ville Laurinkoski, Karin Bähler Lavér, and Scott William Raby as they discuss self-organization as a conscious methodology within contemporary art, resisting institutional norms in this panel discussion.
7 Dec 2024
Thinking Out Loud: T. J. Demos, Siri Paulsen, Ida Bencke and Pujita Guha
Elia-Rosa Guirous-Amasse moderates a conversation with T. J. Demos, Siri Paulsen, Ida Bencke, and Pujita Guha on reimagining equitable futures through chronopolitical methodologies in the face of colonial history and global chaos.
29 Jun 2024
Thinking Out Loud: Solidarity in the arts w. Rasha Salti, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Samara Sallam and Fafaya Mogensen
Thinking Out Loud is a new series of talks, performances, and events that will delve into critical themes spanning arts, philosophy, and social sciences. It aims to showcase diverse perspectives, promoting a collective exchange of ideas and dialogue.
The first event: Solidarity in the Arts, focuses on the intricate challenges associated with the ways cultural institutions engage in conversations, mediation and progression in times of crisis. It examines the extent and formats to which these institutions administer their agency amid complex questions and conditions. The presence of double standards, particularly in addressing colonial oppression, underscores the necessity to reassess collective discourse. This critical juncture has spurred an in-depth discussion about what tools cultural workers possess, and how institutions and spaces position themselves, especially when faced with censorship and financial limitations. This discussion also explores the potential for these institutions to adopt a more fluid, transgressive, and eclectic stance.
29 Jun 2024
Freja Sofie Kirk and Anna Weile Kjær, In conversation
Simian is pleased to present Freja Sofie Kirk and Anna Weile Kjær in conversation about Kirk’s exhibition The End currently on view at Simian. The conversation will seek to unfold Kirk’s practice and revolve around the her methods and experiences in creating the work in the exhibition.
Who has been a guest on Simian Podcasts
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Susanne Ottesen
Michael Thouber
Jesper N Jørgensen
Jesper Elg
Adrian Delafontaine
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Spotify
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 13 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
13
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
32
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