text and photographs by Zoe Chait
Maja Malou Lyse, who has been selected to represent Denmark at the 2026 Venice Biennale, is an artist who turns desire into discourse, wielding erotic currency as both material and method. Her work interrogates the politics of sex, power, and self-image, often blurring the line between personal experience and performance. Whether collecting artifacts of American sexual mythology—like Hugh Hefner’s personal Marilyn Monroe photograph—or immersing herself in the transactional economies of sugar relationships, Lyse confronts the contradictions of femininity and financial dependence with unflinching honesty. Her practice is a collision of spectacle and self-exploration, peeling back the layers of commodified beauty, unconscious yearning, and the ways in which women negotiate their own objectification. In her world, nothing is off-limits—only up for interrogation.
ZOE CHAIT: How's your tattoo? Has it come back?
MAJA MALOU LYSE: I mean, it's still there. It's just more washed out. I don't want it completely gone. It would be fun if it was almost like—you know how when you draw with a pencil and then you try to erase it, and you still see it.
CHAIT: Like trying to erase your past. It never fully disappears.
LYSE: Yeah. I just have this vision of being 80 years old and having the washed-out Playboy tattoo on a super wrinkly ass.
CHAIT: (laughs) Should we talk about what the fuck you were doing in New York this summer?
LYSE: It was like a fever dream, in the best way. I miss it. It's just so funny coming back to Copenhagen. The way of living here is so normal and comfortable. It’s like the opposite of New York.
CHAIT: I guess everything, especially in America, comes back to money and power. That’s probably so different from Denmark. I mean, there is still a wealthy elite, but for the most part, people aren’t struggling to survive in the way that people are in America.
LYSE: No, but also, no one is filthy rich here.
CHAIT: I feel like that's what is interesting about your fascination with America, and in the context of the theme of this issue, desire.
LYSE: We want what we can’t have; classic. Desire is yearning!
CHAIT: In Disorganisation & Sex (2022), Jamieson Webster says that “desire continues to be an open site of investigation and possibility” and “the more impossible the desire, the stronger it is.”
LYSE: Yeah. Desire is the opposite of reality in a way.
CHAIT: Or we never really meet the unconscious desire in reality, and the second we think we've met it, it's transformed into something else. As Webster says, “There's no truth for us beyond unconscious desire, beyond it is only an unknown, a navel, a floor, which causes desire to be constantly reborn.” I feel like that applies to your New York experience—dating apps, seeking arrangements, people coming up to you and shoving their desire onto you—like men walking up to you in parks and asking if they can take you shopping at Lululemon.
LYSE: It was fun. But I did surrender to something that I shouldn’t have. I mean, looking back on it, I was in New York because of a residency paid for by the Danish state. The sole purpose of it is to expand the artist's presence outside of Denmark. They basically pay for you to explore and mingle. I think, subconsciously, I thought that I would have more success finding a sugar daddy than having an art career.
CHAIT: Am I right that your fascination with America is partly in the purchasing of desire, the packaging marketing, and dissemination of desire? For instance, the Marilyn Monroe photograph from Hugh Hefner’s personal collection that you bought at auction and your own personal American saga. It didn't seem like you had a grand scheme for an artwork at the time, but maybe your work is as close as we can get to manifesting unconscious desires. You did seem intrigued by the fantasy of procuring a sugar daddy and making 10 grand a month.
LYSE: I was like, the Danish state is paying me to excel in New York. Should I have studio visits at the residency, or should I go on sugar daddy dates? And I think subconsciously, I thought the odds were better for me with my erotic currency than my artistic talent, which, I guess, at the end of the day, says mostly something about my own self-image.
CHAIT: I'm curious about that.
LYSE: I think I was low-key looking for my exit out of the art world. I was like, well, if I just married rich, then I wouldn't have to work anymore, and I wouldn't have to live an endless precarious life.
CHAIT: A kind of escapism. I don't know what you're sitting around in Denmark daydreaming about, but I feel like in America your fantasy of that kind of lifestyle and the possibility of funding that lifestyle on seeking arrangements was on steroids. I mean, you were just invited to do the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennial. Are you thinking about other things over there now?
LYSE: If I knew at the time that I was doing the next Venice Biennale, I would not have been sucking a sugar daddy’s dick—I would be sucking some art world dick instead. (laughs) When I heard about Venice, I was like, okay, I think I have to take myself and my career more seriously.
CHAIT: Or maybe not.
LYSE: True. I’ll do the Venice Biennale, and I’ll meet a sugar daddy at the opening.
CHAIT: So what happened this summer with your sugar daddy or non-sugar daddy, as it turned out… you were basically catfished.
LYSE: I went to New York, and all I got was catfished.
CHAIT: By a guy in Canada who claimed to be the youngest billionaire. I remember you saying, “I'm telling you… this is happening. He's sending me links to this private island in Italy. We’re going to live there,” and I was like, “I don't know, man…”
LYSE: It was fucked up, but I also love that story. We were both cosplaying—he was a car mechanic cosplaying as a billionaire, and I was an artist cosplaying as a high end escort. But I did spend the night at the biggest suite at the Ritz, and I did get picked up by a private driver, and I did eat at a Michelin restaurant. The fantasy was fully lived out!
CHAIT: Did you make any money?
LYSE: No, because, well, I thought we would get married and move to a private Island in Italy.
CHAIT: In retrospect, how does this escapade connect to the work you were making at the time? After you went to LA for the Playboy mansion auction, you came to New York a few months later, and you found a few sugar parents. You got some cookies and lingerie from the sugar mommy who ghosted you.
LYSE: Lola. She dumped me respectfully. She was in Brazil and would return to New York in the autumn after I had left. So, she proposed that we had an online arrangement where she would send me lingerie and that I would send her videos and pictures in return. In the end, she said that it didn't make sense for her when we weren't able to meet. I think maybe I should have been more emotionally present. I mean, first of all, what I learned on Reddit is that sugar mommies are like unicorns. They do not exist.
CHAIT: Really?
LYSE: It's extremely rare to find a lesbian sugar mommy. But I think women aren't as simple as men, that’s why. I think she wanted me to be more emotionally available, talk on the phone, be more involved in the emotional labor, and that a video of me in lingerie and a shaved pussy being like, “Hiiiii, Lola”—wasn’t doing it for her. You know what I mean?
Where I think with the sugar daddies, it's much more surface, the desire, and actually the desire is to escape the emotional labor of it and just engage with a facade. And I think she could feel that I wasn't putting in the emotional labor that she needed for it to be convincing for her.
CHAIT: I feel like even with men, the dynamic was the men wanted to have control, including the ability to disappear at any moment without accountability.
LYSE: I think it's really hard becoming a sugar baby after you've been a lesbian for four years.
CHAIT: Yeah.
LYSE: My standard of communication, respect, and honesty is very high. It’s one thing to downgrade to men, and another to engage in a transactional relationship.
CHAIT: And now, where do you stand with it? Are you ready to get back in the game?
LYSE: I'm not appalled by it. I think there's no genuine sexual desire in the traditional sense. It's more a desire towards being financially dependent or having access to financial freedom.
CHAIT: Is it financial freedom?
LYSE: I mean, it's not freedom. Freedom is an illusion. To go full psychoanalysis on this would be that I don't believe that I am able to create a financially stable life for myself. My desire is towards people who have a lot of money and that can become a financial safety net. That desire is so massive that it almost makes me horny. The desire to live a financially free life is a bigger orgasm than an actual orgasm.
CHAIT: How does that connect to what you're making work about? What would you say your practice is?
LYSE: I hate that question.
CHAIT: Ok fine. Me too. What’s orienting you in how you view the world as an artist?
LYSE: I'm consumed with sexual currency and femininity, sexual politics, questions of desire and authenticity, erotic spectacles, and image politics. It's hard to round up. But I did in the Marilyn Monroe show when I came back from New York, and I did end up writing some texts and displaying some of these artifacts I had from New York, like the lingerie and the cookies from Lola. The texts were very diary-based. One was about Lola and the cookies and spending my time in the Agent Provocateur store instead of my studio. So I am kind of contemplating these questions of where I place my self-worth in this period of my life, where I should probably be doing studio visits at the residency, but instead, I was doing something else that I felt was more beneficial. And because it was so hot in New York and the cookies were individually wrapped in plastic, they started rotting. And all of a sudden, these rotting cookies became a symbol, I guess —in a very cliche way—of my youth and femininity.
CHAIT: We're rotting day by day.
LYSE: Literally.
CHAIT: Growing up in LA, I've unconsciously, if not consciously, felt my physical appearance was my currency—to varying degrees. And I've really tried to distance myself from that, which brings me to the friction you and I had last summer. I was maybe frustrated with your interest in cultivating the currency that I felt was placed on me without choice, one that I spent the last decade trying to unpack and move away from within in my own self-image.
LYSE: I think that's also interesting because it's very new for me to be overly consumed by these things.
CHAIT: What do you mean?
LYSE: The way you have witnessed me sexually objectifying myself to the extreme. It's not something I feel like I've suffered from growing up. Like, you told me something about how you got your pussy hair lasered in your teens or something.
CHAIT: Yeah, when I was in high school. It was before I even had sex. A lot of my friends were doing it.
LYSE: That, to me, is crazy. I stopped shaving my armpits when I was 17, and I never shaved them again until I went to New York at 30.
CHAIT: Really?
LYSE: Yeah. 17 through 30; I didn't shave my armpits one single time. Or anything else, for that matter. In a way, our experience in that sense is reversed. To me, it feels like a fun experiment, but I can explore these things, not with full autonomy, but with a sense of autonomy because I stepped into this arena as a 30-year-old and not as a teenager. It doesn’t make it liberating, but the context is different.
CHAIT: Yeah that makes sense. And my reaction was based on my own disdain for feeling sexualized when I was younger.
LYSE: I have a more romanticized idea of this field based more on fantasy than trauma. I mean, I grew up in Scandinavia, the ultimate feminist nation. In my twenties, I was extremely fat and I never felt bad about my body. I don't know if I lived in a vacuum–but I feel like I've suffered very little in that sense. So yeah, it's hard to put into words, but do you get where I'm going?
CHAIT: That makes sense—I didn’t see that at the time.
LYSE: I think there's also just a general feminist discourse that's been very dominating the past couple of years insisting on having this idealistic feminist ideology of really revolting against patriarchy with this whole annoying “girl boss” lingo that ‘everything we do, we do for ourselves, and only ourselves. Fuck the male gaze! My Body, My Rules! We sexualize ourselves for our own pleasure only.’ And I mean, if life could be that simple, I would love to live in that world! Sign me up. But the reality is that's not the world we live in. And I feel like this delulu girl boss discourse has dominated so much that I think I started being interested in all my disturbing “non woke” desires and actually wanted to allow myself to explore them in all of their complexity.
CHAIT: Say more.
LYSE: It’s hard to tame desire. And I think that I felt an itch to indulge in the desires you're not allowed to have as a modern woman, which is wanting to be the object, wanting to be the sugar baby that has no autonomy, wanting to be admired for beauty and youth, and actually not being seen as a multidimensional human being who is smart and talented and complicated and nuanced.
CHAIT: That brings me to something we were discussing before; in King Kong Theory (2003), Virginie Despentes writes, “What connection can you have with yourself if even your pussy is systematically controlled by someone else?” If we feel ashamed of our own sexual fantasies and what they imply, how can we ever be liberated or satisfied? Male sexual fantasy is quite obviously everywhere in our world—the male gaze. I don’t think a female gaze is one that pretends not to see that or be affected by it.
LYSE: Yeah, exactly. I was about to say, the rape fantasy is the most common fantasy amongst women. And I mean, what is the difference between a rape fantasy and being actually raped is that there is placed autonomy within the fantasy. But yeah, the male gaze and female gaze made me think of this Margaret Atwood quote that's so on point and so depressing, but she basically says that even when we try to revolt against the male gaze, it's still for the male gaze because revolting against the male gaze is still in response to the male gaze. It's like we're saturated by it. So, in that sense, the female gaze will always be a reaction to the male gaze.
CHAIT: I just looked it up: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
LYSE: Yeah. Your desire is male desire, but I think it's also, it is depressing saying maybe we don't know what female desire is because female desire is still such a product of male desire, and I understand why that's depressing and defeating, but maybe that's also just the truth. And maybe it's easier if we work from there.
CHAIT: Rather than try to deny it.
LYSE: At the end of the day, I'm extremely vanilla. I just want long kisses and missionary, and when I masturbate, I don't think about anything. I don't have any sexual fantasies when I masturbate. I don't have an image in my head. I don't think about anything unless I am in love with someone; then I think about how cute they are. I just think about the bodily sensation otherwise.
CHAIT: That sounds very somatically healthy.
LYSE: But it makes me feel quite broken. I’ve always wanted to be more horny than I actually am. I actually thought I was asexual for a few years. I also didn’t have sex for three years prior to coming out as a lesbian. If I’m to describe what makes me horny, it’s that I make other people horny.
CHAIT: Which is what we're talking about, too.
LYSE: Yeah, exactly. If I can feel that I turn someone on, that turns me on, but I don't know what turns me on outside of it. Maybe nothing?
CHAIT: I can relate. Especially when I was in high school and even in my 20s. It was actually pretty dangerous. I found myself in situations that were violating because the desire to be desired quickly became fear of rejection. And that’s a pretty compromising value system—one that can lead a person to go along with things they aren’t ready for because they think they should. That was part of the sexual culture that I came of age in. There was a disconnect between the discourse around freedom of sexuality and what felt like unspoken guardrails ultimately dictated by how others would see your behavior and how that would affect your desirability—rather than learning what genuinely felt good for you.
LYSE: Yeah.
CHAIT: Speaking of, tell me about the “Page 9 Girl.”
LYSE: The "Page 9 Girl" is a 50-year-old tradition in which a nude woman or girl appeared daily on page nine of the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet. Until 2003, it was legal to be photographed nude starting at 14 years old, but that year, a new law raised the minimum age to 18. Fast forward a few decades, and last year, a major debate erupted over the newspaper’s archives, which contained images from the 1970s to 2003. As societal norms and ethical standards evolved, it suddenly became clear that this major media house had been storing what is now classified as child pornography—hundreds of nude images of girls under 18. Because the female nude is an ultimate spectacle, the revelation sparked a media firestorm. The public debated what should be done with the photos, and ultimately, it was decided that they would be burned and destroyed. However, after the announcement, several former Page 9 girls—now adult women—revolted against the decision. This added an unexpected layer to the discussion: throughout the debate over these images, the women in the pictures had not been consulted. One woman, who had been photographed at 15, told me she never felt like a victim then, and she doesn’t feel like one now—but with the destruction of her images, she suddenly does feel victimized.
CHAIT: So interesting, what did they want to happen? You interviewed some of them?
LYSE: Yes. It becomes a question of media history and what you do when the ethics of images change. What do images represent, what do they mean, and who decides what will be archived and remembered in history? Destroying history is crazy to me.
One of the women, who I met at a cafe, really looked like I was having coffee with my conservative grandma because she was just sitting there with her gray bob and a big scarf that she had knitted at home. And then she's just talking about how the best time of her life was being a huge slut in the ’70s. I loved that contrast! There is such a cultural narrative that when you're a young woman, you do stupid things like sexualize yourself, but then you grow older and wiser. It was actually so refreshing meeting a woman in her late seventies who was still proud of the things she did when she was young. You know what I mean?
CHAIT: She went against that generational narrative.
LYSE: She did. And it was actually, I mean, I am terrified of becoming older, and I realize that I'm terrified of becoming older because it just feels like you become old. As a woman, you become invisible, and then you regret all your shenanigans from when you were young. So you just become invisible, and you're ashamed of yourself.
CHAIT: I feel like you're going to be a hot 70-year-old.
LYSE: Well, I'm already saving up for that facelift, baby.
CHAIT: That’s what your sugar days are for.
LYSE: An investment for the future! It was actually incredibly inspiring meeting her. Looking at, I guess, my own prejudice. That made me a little bit less scared of becoming older because, I mean, it was just nice that she didn't have to look down on the dumb little slut she was when she was younger. She still valued being the girl in the picture, which I liked.
CHAIT: Did she say anything about when that actually came out, or if she remembered what it felt like for that to come out?
LYSE: She was and still is very conscious about the sexual capital she had and how she very actively used it in her youth. But the real question is how you feel when you lose that currency.
CHAIT: And when you no longer feel desired sexually.
LYSE: Yeah, exactly.
CHAIT: Especially when that has been your currency and your orientation in the world.
LYSE: Yeah, so I'm also like, sure, I can have all these delulu hot takes now when I'm 31, but what's really interesting is us having this conversation when we're in our fifties.
CHAIT: Yeah.
LYSE: That's when it becomes really interesting.