Florence Montmare’s Synchronicities: A Nocturnal Geometry
text Kaat Van Der Linden
“I wanted to create a sense of wonder as you enter the space,” says Florence Montmare about her exhibition in Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland. “The compositions of images, projections, reflections, different surfaces, music, and the juxtapositions of simultaneous narratives make up the kaleidoscope, but it never stays the same. That sense of randomness is something I find really exciting,” the Swedish artist explains.
Synchronicities brings together works spanning Montmare’s artistic career, allowing moments and pieces that might initially seem unrelated to reveal deeper connections, forming meaningful coincidences and resonances across time.
The exhibition opens with the short film Hemkomst, in which Montmare explores themes of migration on the islands she has called home at different points in her life. Bringing together both locals and refugees, the film reflects on themes of identity and home, and conditions of migration and displacement. Moving through the exhibition, it becomes difficult not to notice how many of Montmare’s works engage with broader societal issues. “I don’t do it on purpose, but they are hard to avoid,” she says. “In ‘America Series’, I collect personal histories throughout the USA, and they tend to be directly linked to societal issues.”
Throughout her career, Montmare has explored a wide range of recurring themes, including displacement and belonging (It Happens in the Meeting), the hopes and dreams of strangers (America Series), time and memory (Illuminations), the elemental conditions of landscape and figure (Scenes from an Island), time geographies (Missed Connections), and the origin, cycles, and nature of the self (KRIΣ).
images courtesy Florence Montmare
Rather than unfolding as a chronological retrospective, Synchronicities follows a more intuitive logic. By abandoning a conventional timeline, the exhibition forms a personal narrative shaped by associations and encounters. “When I started thinking about what I wanted this exhibition to inhabit, I drew a sketch, planning where each work would be placed,” Montmare explains. “As the exhibition came together, I realised that not every artwork was in the right position. The reflections within the works, and the spatial organisation of the pieces, made it clear that the ordering needed to be reconsidered.”
Montmare describes the experience of moving through the exhibition as watching a film reveal itself. The works are arranged to suggest a narrative, while still leaving space for the viewer’s own interpretation.
Light plays a crucial role in shaping the exhibition’s dreamlike atmosphere. Montmare paid careful attention to the lighting design, changing all of the spots to achieve the desired effect. The spaces between the images are as important as the images themselves, because what is left unseen becomes part of the experience. Carefully chosen indigos and purples create what Montmare describes as a “nocturnal landscape.”
On view until March 1, Synchronicities marks a kind of homecoming for Montmare, as she returns to what she does most naturally: choreographing and building intimate spaces. This was one of her earliest practices, and in Synchronicities, these elements are brought together and fully integrated.
Within Montmare’s wider practice, this exhibition represents both a pause and a turning point, with the sense of pause being embedded in the experience itself, offering visitors space to slow down and breathe. “Some responses I’ve received say that the work feels meditative,” Montmare reflects. “Which is a given, since many of the works are directly related to, and have grown out of, the practice of meditation. In this sense, it is a pause, yet also a forward movement.”
