Octopus Skin, Copper Blood and Blown Glass: Tuomas Laitinen's Siphon

A decade of research into copper has led Helsinki-based artist Tuomas Laitinen to the octopus, and the octopus to Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. His new installation, Siphon, fills the venue's cavernous Main Hall with wall-scale projections of abstracted octopus skin, bathed in thermal magentas and molten ambers.

The project began with copper itself. Laitinen set out ten years ago to trace the material's mythologies and geopolitics. The trail led, improbably, to the octopus, whose copper-based blood carries oxygen through the deep. That conductive thread now runs through every element of the exhibition.

What does the visitor actually see?

The projected imagery combines Laitinen's own footage with recordings of sleeping octopuses from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. On screen, octopus bodies merge into a single churning terrain. An enormous pupil blinks back at the viewer. The scale is immersive; the palette is hot.

Below the projections, on a stepped plinth, water-filled tanks hold Laitinen's blown-glass forms. They are tubular and knotted, and the artist offers them as shelters for octopuses. The glass objects anchor the room in a way the imagery alone could not.

Who else shaped the work?

Two collaborators give Siphon its structure. Kosen Ohtsubo, an 86-year-old master of ikebana, the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement, threads the glass tanks with bare branches, pine, yard-long beans and peanuts strung along wire. His interventions counterbalance the weight of the projections with organic, hand-wrought material.

Above, a sound work titled "8Eternal" (2026) sends the voice of Kenyan composer Nyokabi Kariuki through eight ultrasonic speakers. The beams are narrow. They surface and vanish as visitors move through the space, making the sound itself something to be navigated on foot rather than received from a fixed seat.

Why copper, why octopuses?

The exhibition's logic is material before it is visual. Copper links mining, mythology and marine biology in a single chain. The octopus, with copper-based blood where humans carry iron, becomes both subject and unlikely narrator of that history. Laitinen's sleeping-octopus footage from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology grounds the abstraction in documented animal life.

The show's title, Siphon, points to the same anatomy of exchange: the tube through which an octopus draws water and expels it. Laitinen's glass tubes echo that form, offered back to the animals as possible dwellings.

What does this change for Laitinen? It consolidates ten years of research into his most architecturally ambitious presentation to date, one that binds projection, glass, ikebana and spatialized sound into a single organism of an exhibition. For visitors, it offers a rare case where an ecological argument arrives through heat, light and a blinking pupil rather than a wall text.