Boy World Effigy II is a multichannel video and audio work by the artist duo Hart Lëshkina. Marking their first European institutional solo show, the installation opened in October 2025 at O-Overgaden Museum of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen. The work transforms one of Denmark’s historic choirs, Herning Kirkes Drengekor, into both subject and metaphor, creating an immersive installation that probes the fragile thresholds between individuality and collective order. It situates the choir as a symbolic institution, at once steeped in ritual, discipline, and harmony, while exposing the quiet violence of assimilation that underpins collective belonging.

The installation unfolds as a shifting constellation of performance sequences and uncanny constructed fragments drawn from the choir boys’ daily lives. Harmonized voices and synchronized gestures evoke the polish of tradition and cohesion, yet sudden ruptures, discordant tones, and moments of defiance fracture the surface. In these dissonances, the instability of identity and the ambiguity of personal agency within collective structures come into view. The boys’ choir becomes not only a site of sound and movement, but a living prism through which the hierarchies, systems, and contradictions of collectivity are refracted.

Hart Lëshkina’s fragmented four channel composition resists linear narrative. Instead, the work compels viewers to navigate simultaneities and contradictions, destabilizing the boundaries between ritual and reality, authenticity and performance.

At its core, Boy World Effigy II asks urgent questions: Who exerts control within collective performance? Where does power reside, in the conductor’s command, in the synchronized body of the group, or in the individual voice that falters or breaks away? When does imitation become genuine self expression? These questions echo far beyond the choral tradition, resonating within the mediated landscapes of contemporary media culture, where mimicry, surveillance, and performance shape the contours of identity itself.

By recontextualizing the historic institution of a boys’ choir, Hart Lëshkina illuminate the thresholds that separate harmony from coercion, unity from erasure, performance from authentic selfhood. The installation’s immersive structure resists closure, leaving the audience suspended within the contradictions of collectivity, its comforts and its costs. Boy World Effigy II thus situates itself as a meditation on the precarious conditions of agency and belonging in the present.

Credits: Artist Hart Lëshkina, Curator Anna Frost, Producer Lasse Lund, Cinematographer Anders Von Holck, Casting Soren Drastrup, 1st AC Frank Nielsen, Gaffer Simon Maro, Sound Recordist Gustav Wittendorf, Choir Recordist Alex Mørch, Audio Post Michel Tyabji, Post Production Studio Private, Creative Technologist Thomas Harrington Rawle, Colourist Isaac Hargreaves, Production Coordinator Siw Lillelund, Production Assistant Magne Starck. Cast: Johan Schäfer, Noah Hlíns, Zigurd Villi Bang, Marinus Refnov, Mathias Bruun Lysthauge, Herning Kirkes Drengekor, dogs: Haggi, Werner and Aika. Music: Herning Kirkes Drengekor, Presser
Thank you to Rhea Dall, Frost family, Lone Bergholdt Hald, Severin Korsgaard, Bianca Redgrave, Jels Vikingspil, Lene Bilstrup Pedersen and Brian Bentzen.

This work was made with the support of the Danish Arts Foundation and William Demant Foundation