What does it mean to care for technological life like we care for a garden, a friend or an ecosystem? Can we, as humans, develop a radical form of care for synthetic life? AFTER CARE by the artist duo of Rhoda Ting & Mikkel Bojesen urges us to consider these questions. Here, soft robots are not just machines but companions calling for care rather than control – they breathe, age and respond to their surroundings. Like biological organisms, their lifelikeness derives from their soft, sensitive materiality. Are they imitating life, or are they life?

The work invites a slow, strange intimacy with things usually deemed inert or alien, and draws on modern philosophical movements that break with the idea of fixed binaries like human/nonhuman, living/dead, natural/artificial. AFTER CARE is an absurd yet tender gesture of watering stones and silicone – a form of care given, not because something is useful but because it exists.

AFTER CARE also refers to the concept of “aftercare" from consensual sexual practices – rituals of care, connection and repair following experiences marked by intensity and shifts of power. Ting and Bojesen apply this approach with an eye to ecological healing. What does care look like after ecological pain? How do we create new frameworks and rituals for connection, embracing the technological, the synthetic and the geological?

Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, 2025

Art Bank, Melbourne, 2026
Silicone, pigments, automated pumps and valves, sprinkler system, gravel and reservoir.