In “Within The Wall,” her first institutional solo exhibition at Tranen in Copenhagen, Kaja Lahoda infiltrates the gallery’s very anatomy.
Rather than treating the walls as neutral backdrops, she surgically reveals and reconfigures the material innards—specifically stone wool insulation—transforming an unseen infrastructure into a visceral stage of spectral life. This is not an exercise in building materials, but a gothic reanimation: dead matter becomes uncanny, with figures of silverfish and shadows of past occupants rising from mineral fibers.
Stone wool, often associated with the Danish company Rockwool, becomes Lahoda’s sculptural medium and conceptual fulcrum. Used to insulate homes and maintain interior comfort, the material symbolises both physical warmth and existential insulation—from animals, from the elements, and from each other. Lahoda makes visible this socio-architectural paradox: the very substance that shelters us from discomfort also isolates us from the world. Here, insulation becomes alienation.
Lahoda conjures a bestiary of unwanted cohabitants. Oversized silverfish slink across the gallery's central wall, their prehistoric forms emerging as both sediment and spectre. She renders them in felted steel and stone wool—materials associated with both decay and durability. They resemble fossil imprints as much as fresh infestations, mimicking hoof marks or geological scars. These are organisms out of place, yet not out of time. Their endurance mirrors humanity’s fragility; their resilience is a critique of our dependency on curated domestic ecosystems.
There’s a sinister tenderness in Lahoda’s gestures. Her Rockwool teddy bear is no cuddly comfort, but a molten homage to man’s uneasy alliances with nature. She invokes not only architectural ghosts but also historical ones: the livestock we once cohabited with, the wild animals we've mythologized or domesticated. In evoking past co-inhabitants and invoking volcanic material origins, Lahoda’s work becomes an excavation—both literal and psychological. It questions whether our homes protect us or entrap us, and whether the line between inside and outside was ever real.
