The phrase ‘Soft Robots’ is somewhat paradoxical. It brings to mind something limp and compliant, unlike the rigid programming and mechanical edges we might expect of a machine. Yet, it’s the perfect description for artist duo Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen’s surreal installation, AFTER CARE (2025), which features in Copenhagen Contemporary’s (CC) new exhibition Soft Robots on view until December 31, 2025, on Refshaleøen island. Pastel silicone pieces undulate over pebbles and pools of water; their movements give the illusion of living, breathing bodies that are actually conjured by a system of automated pumps. We feel a strange desire to recoil or pet the slightly grotesque creatures.

It is hardly a new idea to explore the boundary between man and machine, but Soft Robots is the ambitious flagship show of Marie Laurberg’s tenure as CC’s director. It comes at a poignant moment when the Danish government plans to regulate AI-generated deepfakes and protect the rights of individuals over their appearance and voice. Encompassing fifteen artists and artist duos, Soft Robots tackles well-trodden themes like the potential of artificial intelligence and rampant new technologies.

The show tries to set itself apart by giving voice to pan-Asian rather than Western perspectives, inviting several artists of Asian heritage, such as Silas Inoue, Takashi Murakami, Ayoung Kim, WangShui and Yunchul Kim. But this emphasis does not dominate, and is even a little cursory. Perhaps unnecessarily, the exhibition is also tied to Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Nightingale (1843), in which a bird is replaced by a mechanical version whose song is soulless. Written in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, The Nightingale holds up a mirror to the comparable revolution in technology today as we grapple with its possibilities. Soft Robots invites us to consider whether a robot, too, can possess a soul.

Many of the featured artists explore the partnership between humans and robots, like Daria Martin’s mesmerising video Soft Materials (2004). Shot in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, nude performers and robots dance together in faintly farcical mirrored movements that leave it unclear who is leading and who is following. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx series, first shown at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, raises questions about the use and control of human identity by artificial intelligence. The pair have created an AI model that produces fantastical portraits of Herndon regardless of the text prompt, rooted in the essential tropes of her blue eyes and orange hair.

There is also a marvellous collaboration between robotics and nature at CC. The Berlin-based artist Klára Hosnedlová welcomes visitors with chrysalis-like sculptures from her To Infinity series (2023). Nipples, faces and hands erupt from bulbous sculptural silhouettes, conjuring a post-apocalyptic world that has moved beyond the industrial and beyond the body. Inoue imagines an ecosystem that eradicates fossil fuels and cleans up its own environment, with a network of plants and car parts that emits a white mist. The effect of this tentacled mass of tubes, wires and pipes is jellyfish-like—a creature that Inoue often returns to, in particular the species that can generate new polyps and so is de facto immortal.

In turn, Copenhagen-based Nanna Debois Buhl’s sumptuous weavings (Atmospheric Omens, 2025) stem from the shifting effects of climate, derived from the cloud chamber of the CERN research institute in Geneva. An accompanying generative algorithm takes inspiration from the weather patterns cited in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and contemporary and historical photographs of Lake Geneva. Significantly, Shelley wrote her gothic novel from the lake during the infamous summer when the sun was blocked out by a volcanic eruption in Indonesia.

Several of the beneficiaries of CC’s Collide Copenhagen residency with CERN are featured in Soft Robots, including Los Angeles-based Alice Bucknell. Her two-player game (SMALL VOICE, 2025) features two lichen-like protagonists that roam a desolate landscape inspired by quantum theory. Meanwhile, Martyna Marciniak riffs on the viral AI-generated image of Pope Francis in a white Balenciaga puffer coat, sipping an espresso, in the video AI Hyperrealism (2024). The swagged-out Pope gives a lecture on photography and truth.

There are moments of pure delight at CC, like Yunchul Kim’s spinning bundles of filament, which echo the unpredictable movements of solar particles in Mercury’s magnetic fields (Mercurial, 2024) and Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen’s robotic sheep’s head (Broadcaster, 2018) that proffers the power of wool. The most enchanting moment comes in the form of A.A. Murakami’s bubbles that gently billow across a darkened gallery, like primordial amoeba, and burst in clouds of fog (Beyond the Horizon, 2024). The British-Japanese duo has long been interested in the ephemeral materiality of bubbles and their association with impermanence in Asian culture or ‘the floating world’ in Buddhist philosophy. Here, transient materials and technology collide to wondrous effect.

Perhaps the most cautionary work in the show is Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2023), though the film is gorgeously produced and draws us in with its game-like aesthetic. Kim explores the gig economy of a futuristic Seoul and the rise of non-contact food deliveries during COVID-19 through the eyes of courier Ernst Mo. As Mo speeds through the city on her motorbike, managed by the algorithm Dance Master, she becomes so efficient that she earns the rank of Ghost Dancer.

A sense of wonder pervades CC’s industrial halls—it’s a refreshing antidote to the doom and gloom so often associated with new technologies. Soft Robots may not challenge the potential threats of machines, but it demonstrates the power of art to ignite our curiosity.

‘Soft Robots The Art of Digital Breathing’ is on view at the Copenhagen Contemporary from June 20, 2025 – December 31, 2025.