What does a mineral fought over by industry and nations have to do with an octopus? Quite a lot, argues the Helsinki-based artist Tuomas Laitinen. His exhibition Siphon at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn traces the geopolitics and mythologies of copper and connects them to the octopus, whose blood uses a copper-based protein rather than iron to carry oxygen — which is why it runs blue.
A room that breathes
The vast Main Hall is covered in wall-scale projections of abstracted octopus skin, washing the space in thermal magentas and molten ambers. Laitinen combined his own footage with recordings of sleeping octopuses made at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. On screen the bodies merge into one churning landscape, and every so often an enormous pupil blinks at the audience. It is part nature film, part dream, part warning about the materials on which our electrified world depends.
Glass homes and living branches
On a stepped plinth stand water-filled tanks holding Laitinen’s blown-glass forms, tubular and knotted, conceived as shelters for octopuses. The heaviness of the projections is balanced by a surprising collaborator: Kosen Ohtsubo, an 86-year-old ikebana master, who threads the glass with bare branches, pine, yard-long beans and peanuts strung on wire. The meeting of laboratory-like glass and the centuries-old discipline of Japanese flower arrangement gives the installation an unexpected gentleness.
Sound you can walk into
Overhead hangs 8Eternal (2026), which transmits the voice of the Kenyan composer Nyokabi Kariuki through eight ultrasonic speakers. Their narrow beams of sound appear and vanish as visitors move, so each person hears a different composition depending on where they stand — eight arms of sound for an eight-armed muse.
Why it is worth the trip
Many exhibitions talk about extraction and ecology; few make it a bodily experience. Siphon asks visitors to feel the link between the cables in their phones and the creatures of the deep, and it does so with beauty rather than lecture. For anyone interested in where installation art, design and performance meet, it is one of the more inventive shows in New York this autumn.