Art

Chuck Olson on Heritage, Ambiguity, and the Studio Beyond Time Written by Jahwanna Berglund images courtesy Ian Bald On his first visit to Stockholm, American painter Chuck Olson speaks with Jahwanna Berglund about Swedish-American inheritance, the cultural pull of France and Italy, deliberate ambiguity, and the studio as a place outside time. There were several firsts that evening. It was Chuck Olson’s first visit to Stockholm, and my first time passing through the gates of Villa Åkerlund, the official residence of the US Ambassador to Sweden. Hidden behind walls and greenery in Stockholm’s diplomatic quarter, the residence had long stirred my curiosity. I had often wondered what lay beyond its gates and, perhaps even more, what hung on its walls. Through the US State Department’s Art in Embassies programme, each ambassador helps select a collection of American art for the official residence during their posting. The result is something between a private home, a gallery, and a diplomatic stage, where the works become part of both everyday life and international exchange. Inside, the residence staff welcomed me and surrounded me with paintings carrying their own histories. Yet one work immediately held my attention: a monumental field of cobalt blue, painted by the man I had come to meet. Chuck Olson’s own connection to Sweden reaches back two generations. Swedish traditions remained present throughout his American childhood, woven into family rituals, faith and memory. After several days visiting art schools and cultural institutions across Stockholm, we sat down to speak about inheritance, cultural identity, and the quiet tensions that continue to shape his work. Jahwanna Berglund: Your grandparents left Sweden, yet Swedish traditions remained in your family. Two generations later, what did you inherit? Chuck Olson: When your grandparents move, the question becomes: what do you inherit of what mattered to them? We had Swedish Christmases. The 24th was Swedish, and the 25th was American. We went to a Swedish Lutheran church, and I was baptised there. That mixture of rituals becomes part of your cultural DNA. JB: Your life has also been shaped by France and Italy. What has each culture brought to your painting: palette, structure or the way you resolve a canvas? CO: I married a French woman, and we have built a life that moves between these cultures. The dinner table debates say a great deal. My Italian cousin once asked whose bread was better, and I said, ‘French’. In northern Italy, around Parma, you do not have the same abundance of vegetables as you find in the south, while the French kitchen is perhaps more curious. Still, those little Italian wines are perfect with pasta. At home, I cook Italian and Marie cooks French. In the studio, France sharpened my eye for structure and restraint, while Italy expanded my sense of light and my appetite for colour. I edit like a French painter and layer like an Italian cook: clarity overlaid with richness. JB: How did you come to know Ambassador Christine J. Toretti, and how did your work become part of the collection at Villa Åkerlund? CO: We are both from Indiana, Pennsylvania, which is also Jimmy Stewart’s hometown. With Christine, we met through education and the place of the arts in society. Politics aside, art is where we talk. When she said, ‘I want one of your paintings in the residence’, I thought, ‘Sweden, here we go’. JB: Your work is often described through a Franco-American duality. What happened when that sensibility encountered Sweden? CO: Before this visit, I did not know Sweden’s contemporary art culture firsthand. After three remarkable days visiting institutions and art schools, I have a much better sense of it. I am curious about how the Swedish eye reads restraint, silence and landscape, and how water, distance, and light operate here. JB: What are you seeking within the paintings themselves? CO: Often, it is a quiet confrontation. Not something angry, but the viewer alone. With this work, I kept thinking: I am in a kayak, by myself. I turn, and there is something there, perhaps a ruin. I like deliberate ambiguity—forms that feel like trees, and then perhaps they are not. Something beneath the water that you can see but cannot name. A British critic once wrote that my paintings are like a shell you pick up on the beach. It is too compelling to leave behind, so you put it in your pocket and take it home. You forget it on a shelf, and then one day you rediscover why you kept it. I do not think artists know everything about their work. It grows like a flower, with roots. I aim for the intellectual curiosity of an adult and the sense of wonder of a child. We oscillate between the two. JB: Where does that movement between play and responsibility enter the work? CO: A Zippo is a toy when you flick it, but once there is a flame, it becomes a responsibility. A pocketknife spins in the hand, but once the blade is out, it becomes a responsibility too. That shift from play to consequence is a space I like to paint. JB: What does the studio mean to you? CO: It is where nothing really changes. The paintings evolve, but for fifty years I have walked into the studio and become the same age again, somewhere in my early thirties. Your failures get better, but the work must remain restless enough to keep you honest. Doubt, excitement, the urge to leave and then return tomorrow: those are all signs that you are still alive in the work. JB: The cobalt painting at Villa Åkerlund was created two years ago. How did it develop, and how does it relate to the rest of the series? CO: I work on eight or nine paintings at once, in an easel room with built-in easels reaching three metres high. Some canvases are four metres wide, others three and a half or two and a half. If one painting stalls,

Theresa Traore Dahlberg: “Anything Can Become Anything” Text by Natalia Muntean Theresa Traore Dahlberg says she always needed to collect, but starting art school and becoming a mother made her take the time to go further and look at what she collected from different angles. Stones, fabrics, photos, metal – she brings them home and finds a place for them in her works. Anything can become anything if you put the time into it and you stay with it,” says the artist, who grew up between Sweden and Burkina Faso and works across sculpture, installation, and documentary film. Her films, among them Ouaga Girls and The Ambassador’s Wife, have screened at Toronto, Berlin, and the Hammer Museum; her sculptures transform decommissioned industrial materials into what she calls Lings: new beings emerging from old, sometimes violent, matter. Traore Dahlberg is currently one of eight artists in Earthly Bodies Born of Love at Verket, the historic ironworks in Avesta, curated by Karolina Aastrup and Sona Stepanyan and on display until 20 September 2026. She is also at work on a major public commission in Gothenburg, due in 2029.  Natalia Muntean: Tell me about Signals Beyond 2025, the body of work you’re exhibiting at Avesta Art, as part of the Earthly Bodies Born of Love exhibition.Theresa Traore Dahlberg: It started with the curator, Sona Stepanyan, who saw an exhibition I was part of at Liljevalchs, Stockholm Cosmologies, and asked me to participate. I had actually exhibited parts of this material the summer before, at the Helsinki Biennial, with a body of work called Signals Beyond 2025. And it’s material I usually work with, copper cards from a circuit factory that keep coming back in different forms. For Helsinki, they asked me to come up with a work made specifically from materials sourced in Finland, so I started working with these silver cards, material from the shift between 3G and 4G, that had been used in communication cards, radio, and all kinds of communication infrastructure. The Biennial’s theme was non-human agencies, so for me it became about using these cards to build very abstract bird-and-place forms. I call these formations Lings, like a fledgling. Octavia Butler wrote about fledglings, when a bird is born but can’t fly yet. But for me, these aren’t necessarily birds, but beings that are coming up, new, open to the world. There’s an interaction between them, but they’re also coming out of this landscape of old material. So it’s about transformation – new narratives coming out of old, sometimes violent, material. Photography by Saskia Clarke NM: Does working on a group exhibition with people from such different countries influence your perspective on your own work?TTD: There were a lot of monumental installations, so we had to find the balance where each work gets the light it needs, but still works together. It’s such a fine difference because with my piece, when it’s a little darker, it becomes gold; a little lighter, it becomes silver. I try to find the balance where it feels almost like a water surface and like the material is breathing.  NM: How does the Avesta Art space itself affect the work?TTD: Avesta Art is a remarkable post-industrial space, so there is already a dialogue between the architecture and the materials I work with. The materials often originate from industrial processes, and in a way, they return to an industrial environment. The scale of the building, its high ceilings, the light, and the surrounding atmosphere all become part of the work.  I also like to keep the materials in the space for a while before the installation is finalised, allowing them to absorb something of the environment. They almost marinate in the space until they feel as though they belong there. NM: The exhibition’s title, Earthly Bodies Born of Love, feels very different from that industrial, data-economy framing. Did you know the title beforehand?TTD: No, I didn’t. I really like the title; it’s very poetic. It comes from one of Petra Hermanova’s song titles, and she performed at the opening, and it influenced the curators and the whole exhibition.   NM: What was installing the piece actually like?TTD: Those old industry buildings have a special kind of rawness. It was freezing when I installed, although it was a sunny spring week. But it was completely quiet except for some birds that had moved in during winter. And I think that exhibiting there makes a big difference – showing something that’s not just in a white cube, that comes with its own history.  ‘Beyond Signals II’ Photographer:Mattias Lindbäck NM: This body of work has now travelled through several different spaces: Helsinki, Liljevalchs, Avesta Art. Are they a continuation or separate works in dialogue?TTD: I see them as chapters, but not as a linear progression. Some installations grow out of the previous one. I like to return to it and discover new layers. The Lings are a continuation of a sculpture I made called Hakili the Hare, which has been nominated for the High Line Plinth in New York. It is a public competition for the 2029–2030 commissions, and the selected work will be on view to about eight million visitors. NM: If we could go back to the beginning – where do you think this need to collect things comes from?Theresa Traore Dahlberg: I think it all begins with curiosity. As a child, I was fascinated by the shape and texture of things. Today, that curiosity often begins with a material. Take the cotton I’m working with now; I’m interested not only in its history, but also in the people who have worked with it and the lives it has passed through. It becomes a way of exploring together with the material itself. What first appears to be a simple material gradually reveals layers of history, politics, and personal stories. My practice is driven as much by curiosity as by intention. I rarely know where a work will end up; instead, I follow the material and the

“A Race Against Time”: Ryan Koopmans on The Wild Within Text by Natalia Muntean Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell have spent the better part of a decade turning abandoned buildings into something else entirely. Their project, The Wild Within, started in Tskaltubo, Georgia, in the ruins of former Soviet sanatoriums, and has since taken the duo through Armenia, Lebanon, Italy, Poland, Mexico and beyond. Each piece starts as a documentary photograph of a real, decaying space, then is rebuilt in the studio with digitally sculpted vegetation, light and motion, part archive, part invention. Ahead of their solo show at Leila Heller Gallery in New York this September, Koopmans talks about ruins, revival, and the blurry line between what’s real and what isn’t. NM: What do you look for in a building?RK: It doesn’t need to be old, but it needs deterioration, moss, water damage, some marking of time and human presence, even just where pipes have been ripped out. In Georgia, the Soviet-era buildings aren’t even that old, built in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s; we’re not looking for ancient ruins. We look for buildings that are unique and strange, geometric, symmetrical, a good, balanced, straight-on composition, and ideally with openings between interior and exterior that let us emphasise that boundary. And we look for places that haven’t been overly photographed already. NM: Has a building ever surprised you, looked right on paper, then turned out not to be, once you got there?RK: All the time, every trip. Often you find images online and by the time you arrive, the building’s gone, or fully renovated, or partially torn down, or the roof’s collapsed. Sometimes one usable location is enough to justify the whole trip. Other times, you travel for one specific building, don’t end up using it, and instead stumble onto something completely different. Every country, every trip, has some huge challenges and some amazing unexpected discovery. NM: Do you usually shoot the interiors, rather than the exteriors?RK: Yes, usually inside, that’s the core of it. We have shot facades and exteriors before, but mostly we’re looking for interior spaces with doorways or windows, which we later remove to create depth between interior and exterior. We shoot the inside and often use photogrammetry to scan it; instead of a single picture, we shoot 360 degrees of a space, then combine it in software into a three-dimensional, navigable model. You can walk under a balcony because you’ve shot from so many angles. Back at our studio in Stockholm, we reconstruct those photographs into a 3D space using software like Cinema 4D. Then we build and model the overgrowth, the floor, the plants, the flowers, the light, and add motion. The final piece is a single-point-perspective video work, though it exists in two forms: video and large-format prints. More recently, we’ve added a third layer, physical mosaics of these scenes. It came full circle, in a way: in Georgia, there were mosaics on the walls of these buildings, and an old post office full of postcards people had sent from the sanatorium town. Seeing those floral postcards scattered on the ground was actually one of the early sparks for thinking about colour and flowers inside these decrepit spaces. Now we’re making hand-cut glass mosaics; some recreate the postcards directly, others are our typical architecture-and-nature pieces rendered physically. They take months to make. NM: How do you choose the plants and flowers you add?RK: It depends on the piece. Sometimes it’s purely aesthetic: colour, shape, scale, composed around the architecture. Most of the plants originate from photographs of real flowers that we bring into 3D and manipulate, and over time we re-adapt them until they become almost a fantastical, non-existent species. That points to a relationship we like exploring: what’s real and what isn’t. People often assume the architecture is the fake part and nature is real, when actually it’s the reverse: the architecture is human-made and real, and nature is the artificial layer. Other times the plants are more literal: the national flower of a country, or for a piece from an old psychiatric facility in Italy, every plant was medicinal, used for treatment in some way. But composition, scale, and colour are always a big part of the decision, alongside whichever concept we’re working with, including researching and rebuilding species that are genuinely endemic to a place, like a recent piece in Cyprus using five or six native species. NM: You started in Georgia, then moved through Armenia, Lebanon, Italy, Poland, and now this new chapter spans Italy, Poland, Lebanon, Mexico, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and India. What connects all these places?RK: After Georgia, we realised this phenomenon exists in so many places. Armenia came next, then Lebanon, then Western Europe, Italy in particular, which has an enormous history of interesting architecture and sociocultural reasons for abandonment, and southern Poland. For a while our interest shifted to the Levant and the Gulf. India is fascinating too, though we’ve only spent a bit of time around Mumbai, but there’s so much to explore that it’s actually been daunting. And we recently shot in Mexico, which has a completely different history and lineage behind its abandonment. The locations end up scattered because it really comes from personal interest, real life bringing up an interest in a place. NM: Is there a deeper thread connecting them, beyond the buildings themselves?RK: It’s abandoned buildings that are actively decaying, not being protected or preserved, almost a race against time. A lot of these countries are also going through exponential transformation and redevelopment, so there’s a high concentration of change happening as a country modernises, and that’s often what pulls our interest to a place. It’s not an infinite resource, either; it’s more like an existing stock that slowly disappears. You can’t manufacture a new abandoned building. NM: Was there a site that changed how you think about the project, or was harder to document than most?RK: Tskaltubo was the most impactful. I had never seen buildings designed quite

As She Conquers the Art World, Curator Carolina Edman Remains in Pursuit of Its Infinite Layers text Anna Mikaela Ekstrand In this conversation, Swedish curator Carolina Edman reflects on her own practice and others that are defined by curiosity, rigour, and a refusal of easy solutions. Working between New York, Paris, and Stockholm, she is always looking to the future, but learning from the past. Anna Mikaela Ekstrand: You are pictured at Elizabeth Street Garden and the Temple of Dendur. Why are these places important to you and your curatorial praxis? Carolina Edman: Elisabeth Street Garden is a place of wonder and tranquillity apart from the intensity of New York. To me, it transcends a mere green space; something living, something real is taking place in everything. The garden has a series of stone sculptures, including the Goddess of the Harvest, Hermes the Messenger, Sphinxes, and a reclining Lion. Medusa in a corner stands as a symbol of survival. These elements are of historical and artistic significance. The seasonal changes interact with the sculptures; the flowers in the summer and the glossy green ivy leaves turn brilliant shades of orange, red, and crimson in the fall, becoming part of the composition. I believe that we can never be separated from nature and that humans and our culture are always interlinked with the site around us. The garden’s elements are interrelated, creating an environment, a holistic sculpture, if you will. But I am interested in the garden not as a kind of Eden, or the idea of equilibrium in Western mythology. There is never a clear division between us and the interface with our surroundings, and it is about the dynamic interplay. The fundamental part is the resilience of the constantly self-changing system that is evolution, and I believe there are many parallels here to artists. I am proud to have been part of the community that saved the garden from being demolished. photography Danilo Laura fashion Nicole Yang ‘Edman played a critical role by contributing her expertise in the history of art and its legal aspects to lay out the ideas to protect the garden. It is an irreplaceable physical and social sculpture, which she helped our community articulate and express’ – Joseph Reiver During the past years of calling New York home, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been another core pillar of my life in the city. I often come to seek a specific object, or to simply meander. For good and for worse, this huge accumulation of objects stands out from any other museum in the world. Being able to sit in their presence is unique. Walking through the galleries creates temporal axes across millennia and ancient civilisations. It is precisely these bold curatorial dialogues that fascinate me. It is an approach to art that is at once generous, rigorous, and entirely thought-provoking. I am looking forward to how this will be developed by Frida Escobedo’s vision for the Tang Wing. The current exhibition of Giacometti at the Temple of Dendur is a case in point. It succeeds in an ahistorical homage to human artistic expression through history, an unforgettable curatorial juxtaposition, only possible at the Met. It demands a new way of looking at Giacometti. Of course, pairing more recent art with ancient artefacts is not a novel curatorial move. One of my favourite exhibitions is Harald Szeemann’s A-Historische Klanken [Ahistorical Sounds] at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in 1988. It visualised the form of jolting dialogues made possible by placing objects from across time in proximity. I believe today, with the broader flattening of time, these exhibitions are more relevant than ever. AME: Your writing and curatorial ideas centre around what you have called the ‘nonfinite’. Tell me more. CE: I am interested in the ‘nonfinite’ as a distinct aesthetic mode. This is not about interruption or artwork which is unfinished. It is about artwork that is not retained only in the brain, but is, somehow, an energy. It is art that incorporates and invites the observer in its creation; it has the capacity to elicit imagination, or a form of alterity within, and sustain a continuous, mediumistic openness. Since our minds cannot properly conceive the infinite, and indeed recoil from the very thought, we settle for the nonfinite. The world we inhabit extends beyond what can be seen; we live in a palimpsest of ‘structures of feeling’, in rooms framed by the longing of the soul. This largely invisible architecture creates a vessel for the world to arrive into. We always have the ability to access the plane where possibility takes shape, where contradictions are unified, and it is possible to reconfigure and reframe that which shapes our thoughts and actions. That plane is radical because it assumes there is always a way beyond.  At this moment, my confidence in the purpose of aesthetics, and that there are things only art can give us, by means specific to it, rests in the knowledge of its unendedness. The nonfinite evokes the sense of ordinary, or elemental, magic of life. It borders on the impossible, often eccentric, pursuit of beauty across art, science, architecture, politics, agriculture, theology, and fashion. So, I am looking for something beyond the mask of contemporary society. Something otherworldly. How do we access that? How do we ask better questions? Or, ‘How do we flood the gate?’ as Arthur Jafa has put it. AME: What is participatory imagination? CE: Consider seeing Turner’s painting with the mythological scene of Ulysses. In reality, it is merely a conglomeration of pigments and compositional parts, but we complete it in our minds; we wonder where on the journey the scene takes place; we experience an entire world in the eye of our mind.  Participatory imagination describes how meaning emerges through our encounters. We make art come into existence through observation, based on personal experience and collective consciousness. This does not mean that it is all constructed, but simply that the essential character, or aura, of a

Galerie Nordenhake Marks 50 Years with a Three-City Exhibition Text by Natalia Muntean Galerie Nordenhake opens its 50th anniversary exhibition across all three of its spaces during the first weekend of July. Stockholm from 3 July to 15 August, Berlin from 4 July to 29 August, and Mexico City from 7 July to 22 August. The exhibition, titled Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City, 50 years, brings together historical works and new commissions by 84 artists, functioning as both an exhibition and a living archive of the gallery’s history since its founding in Malmö in 1976. Rather than a chronological survey, the show centres on the relationships between artists and the gallery cultivated over five decades, an acknowledgement that the most significant thing a gallery does is not the buildings it occupies or the fairs it attends, but the sustained commitment to artists and ideas over time. Founded by Claes Nordenhake, the gallery moved to Stockholm in 1986, opened a Berlin space in 2000, and established a Mexico City location in 2017. Along the way it gave early shows to Nan Goldin, Mona Hatoum, Antony Gormley, David Hammons, and Jimmie Durham, among others, and has remained a consistent presence at Art Basel since 1978. “I started my gallery in 1976 in Malmö, a relatively small Swedish city back then. In those early years, the interest in our exhibitions was modest, but I believed deeply in the artists and the vision we presented. Fifty years later, this milestone feels both humbling and affirming — a testament to the commitment of our artists, the loyalty of our collectors and visitors, and the many colleagues who have sustained this endeavour,” says Claes Nordenhake, Founder of Galerie Nordenhake. The Stockholm space, designed by Gerda Persson and Bo Pilo, opens with Olle Bærtling’s seminal 1951 painting Univers en formation, paired with John McCracken’s minimalist Plank Black-Blue from 1985. Works by Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Antony Gormley, all made during pivotal periods in the artists’ careers, are also on view, alongside photographs from the late 1990s by Dawoud Bey and Nan Goldin, including Goldin’s Ulrika, Stockholm (1998), a portrait of Claes and Margareta Nordenhake’s daughter, taken during the family’s Stockholm years. Important paintings by Swedish artists Torsten Andersson and Cecilia Edefalk are shown alongside newly commissioned works by Sarah Crowner, Ryan Mrozowski, and Ann Edholm. The Berlin space, designed by Gonzalez Haase AAS, spans works from 1961 to the present. The historical selection includes Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square (Receptive), François Morellet’s Seule droite traversant 2 carrés dans deux plans différents (1978), Michael Schmidt’s triptych Waffenruhe (1985–87), and Jimmie Durham’s Schlimmbesserung (1992). New commissions include a large-scale wall drawing by Marjetica Potrč imagining coexistence between people and nature in a post-Anthropocene rural Istria; a new light and colour installation by Spencer Finch, expanding on work first shown in his 2005 debut at the gallery; a life-size cut-collage by Frida Orupabo, Big Regrets, designed as a freestanding sculpture for the main gallery space; and new paintings by Sophie Reinhold and Paul Fägerskiöld. The Mexico City space, designed by Frida Escobedo, presents works that speak to the ongoing dialogue between the gallery’s European legacy and contemporary Latin American practice. Historical works by Robert Morris and Rémy Zaugg, which echo the gallery’s founding program, are shown alongside new commissions created specifically for this anniversary by Iñaki Bonillas, José Eduardo Barajas, Elena Damiani, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, and Jerónimo Rüedi. The space, which has served as a vital bridge between the gallery’s European roots and the Americas since opening in 2017, also features work by Mirosław Bałka, Emma Bernhard, Ayan Farah, Eva Löfdahl, Runo Lagomarsino, Silvia Gruner, and Marcelo Pacheco, among others. Ahead of the openings, a catalogue dedicated to the gallery’s history launches at Art Basel. Edited by Gerard Byrne and designed by Peter Maybury, it features commissioned texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Steffanie Hessler, and María Minera, and includes special editions and unique works produced by Iñaki Bonillas, Sarah Crowner, Spencer Finch, Frida Orupabo, and Håkan Rehnberg.

Peripheral emOtions: Alice Shulman on Her Exhibition for the Brixtol Textile Art Scholarship 2026 Text by Natalia Muntean Photo by Jonas Ingerstedt Every two years, Brixtol Textiles invites an artist to transform deadstock fabrics from its production into a new body of work through the Brixtol Textile Art Scholarship. Established in 2022, the biennial initiative seeks to support artistic experimentation while highlighting the creative potential of existing materials. This year’s scholarship recipient is Stockholm-based artist Alice Shulman. Presented at Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, her exhibition Peripheral emOtions features nine new sculptural installations that explore the relationship between glass and textile through waxed fabrics, frayed threads, folded surfaces and hand-blown glass. The works continue Shulman’s ongoing project Emotional Landscape, investigating how material, form and space can give shape to emotions that often remain just beyond our immediate awareness. “Brixtol Textiles was founded from a deep appreciation for textiles and the tactile experience of exceptional materials,” says Emil Holmström, co-founder of Brixtol Textiles. “The Brixtol Textile Art Scholarship celebrates artists who share our passion for textile craftsmanship and creative expression. Through this initiative, we hope to inspire new perspectives on textiles and contribute to a more vibrant and innovative creative landscape in Sweden.” For Holmström, the choice of Shulman as the 2026 recipient was clear. “Alice Shulman stood out this year for her unique approach to materiality and her unexpected use of our deadstock fabrics. Working from the medium of glass sculpture, she proposed a dialogue between two contrasting materials, textile and glass, that felt both innovative and poetic.” We spoke with Alice Shulman about peripheral emotions, the conversation between glass and textile and the role of materiality in expressing what words sometimes cannot. Natalia Muntean: What does the phrase Peripheral emOtions mean to you, and why did you choose it for this body of work?Alice Shulman: Peripheral emotions are feelings that linger at a distance. Whether subconscious or intentionally placed in the background, they continue to shape how we experience the world. I chose the title because the work explores these quieter emotional states that often exist outside our immediate attention. NM: What drew you to explore these quieter, less visible emotional states?AS: In this work I”m interested in the emotions that are present but not immediate. They can be conflicting, difficult to capture or just more quiet, yet they often influence us as much as our more obvious feelings. Photo by Jonas Ingerstedt NM: What can glass and textiles communicate that language sometimes cannot?AS: Materials communicate through presence and sensation rather than explanation. Together they create composition, harmony or dissonance. Sometimes it’s close to sublime, sometimes there is friction. Emotions are the starting point of language. NM: How did these two materials begin to speak to each other during the creative process?AS: It’s like both materials contaminate each other through the process. The fabric was made even more sturdy in order to support the glass – it stiffened in a simple motion just as glass does while fired. The glass – I always take clues from textile processes while working with it, by cutting glass while it’s hot, for instance, but in this work, it was also a matter of ornamentation. NM: How did the collaboration with master glassblowers in the Czech Republic shape the work?AS: The collaboration allowed me to work at a larger scale and push the material further. The final pieces emerged through a balance of artistic intention, craftsmanship, and the material’s own behaviour. NM: How did the rooftop setting influence the exhibition?AS: Sven Harry’s Rooftop is an iconic background. The pebbles, the golden walls and the Stockholm skyline with a striking blue sky make a perfect backdrop. It’s a manifestation of Swedish design tradition. With glass playing such a part in Swedish craft history, I think it’s wonderful to push that tradition into the future. NM: Did working with deadstock fabrics influence the ideas behind the exhibition?AS: Yes, through its sturdy, crispy character, it had a very sculptural structure and a natural will to shape by itself. NM: What do you hope visitors take with them after encountering Peripheral emOtions?AS: I hope the works give the visitors some minutes to reflect on their own emotional landscape. Photo by Ida Blom

When Politics Divides, Art Refuses to Stay in Place text Jahwanna Berglunds   In a world increasingly fractured by war, political polarization, and rigid borders both physical and ideological, it is easy to assume that cultural dialogue is breaking down. Governments clash, narratives harden, and positions calcify into identities. Yet, amidst this discord, art operates on an entirely different plane.    Art moves with a rare fluidity. It traverses boundaries, resists simplistic interpretation, and refuses to be confined to a single perspective. Where political discourse often demands clarity and alignment, art embraces contradiction. It holds tension without needing resolution, offering space for ambiguity in an era that increasingly demands immediate answers.   This became especially clear to me during Stockholm Art Week, not as an abstract idea but as a lived experience. At the Market Art Fair, my attention was drawn less to the explicit “meaning” of each work and more to its “doing.” Across booths and exhibitions, there was a quiet but persistent engagement with global realities: identity, migration, memory, and belonging. These themes were not presented as statements or slogans, but as fragments, gestures, and questions that resisted closure. Perhaps it is in this resistance that genuine cultural dialogue begins – not in agreement, but in proximity.   Cultural exchange, in its most authentic form, is rarely neat or conclusive. It does not culminate in consensus but unfolds in liminal spaces between cultures, interpretations, discomfort, and recognition.   Anders Krisár High Diver, Stockholm Art Week, ODALISQUE  Issue 17  Katherine Bradford Encounter In The Sky, Stockholm Art Week, ODALISQUE Issue 17 This idea gained sharper resonance during a conversation hosted at the Residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, Christine Toretti. The discussion, led by Destinee Ross-Sutton and featuring Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow, Jordan Zayas Kelly, and Chuck Ohlson, stood out for its candor and openness. It was not about reaching agreement, but about creating exposure allowing diverse positions, backgrounds, and lived experiences to coexist without being reduced to a single narrative. In a climate where conversations often feel pre framed, managed, or performative, this openness felt radical. It created room not only for speaking, but for listening across perspectives that do not need to align. Outside these rare spaces, there is constant pressure toward simplification: to choose a side, define a position, and compress complexity into something immediately legible. But art resists this urgency. It slows perception, inviting us to remain with ambiguity rather than resolve it too quickly. Still, it would be naïve to suggest that art alone can bridge political or cultural divides. It cannot. It does not replace diplomacy or resolve conflict. What it does offer is more subtle but equally important: it creates space – space for contradiction, nuance, and voices that might otherwise remain unheard outside formal structures of dialogue.     This is why long-term cultural initiatives are becoming increasingly significant. Programs connecting cities like Stockholm and New York, bringing artists into sustained residency, offer a different model of exchange. These are not symbolic encounters but lived engagements; not representation from a distance, but participation within shared time and space. True dialogue does not happen in passing. It requires time, friction, and a willingness to remain in relation even when understanding is incomplete.   We are witnessing a broader shift. Cultural landscapes once seen as stable shaped by geography, history, and inherited narratives are now in constant reassembly through movement, migration, and the circulation of images, ideas, and people. What emerges is not the replacement of one culture by another, but a layered condition: a continuous negotiation of identity that resists final form. Art exists within this condition. It absorbs what was, responds to what is, and gestures toward what could be. Increasingly, it feels less like representation and more like an atmosphere shared but not owned, sensed rather than defined. A language that may not translate cleanly, but still communicates deeply. “EARL”. Deborah Roberts, In Changing Black Voices curated by Destinee Ross Sutton Image Curtesy Of The Artist. Art is not a solution or an answer. It is a space where things can remain open without being forced into closure. This, perhaps, is the most lasting impression from Stockholm: not clarity, but a different relationship to complexity. A reminder that cultural dialogue is not measured by agreement, but by the willingness to remain open within difference. In a divided world, that openness is not softness, it is work.

Chellis Baird Redefines What a Painting Can Be text Anna Mikaela Ekstrand body suit Capezio  tights Falke  trenchcoat Lapointe  heels Christian Louboutin Over the past decade, of showing at prestigious galleries, institutions, and the odd member club, her work has been presented by leading galleries in New York and Paris. We visited her Long Island City studio to talk about how her work pushes boundaries by combining dress, movement, and the mechanics of fabric in new ways.   “After visiting the Museum of Modern Art, in my late twenties, I remember standing in front of a Barnett Newman painting and starting to cry. It was at that point that I knew I was going to share my art with the world,” Chellis Baird commented in a 2023 interview. In her early twenties, she was living in New York and working as a designer at Ralph Lauren, making her own art when she was off the clock. A dream for many, but she hadn’t quite made it yet. Hailing from a South Carolina textile town and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design—known for fostering cross-disciplinary education—Baird not only had a deep understanding of fabrics and their innovation from the get-go, but a passion for continuing to push their boundaries. Movement is deeply embedded in her practice, dancing ballet multiple days a week, she sees it as a hobby, but when a principal dancer from the New York City Ballet saw her, he likened her to a professional. She’s a Type A creative.          When Baird transitioned into making art full-time, living her dream, she literally painted the town red. The Touch of Red at the National Arts Club is among the many exhibitions that centered on her signature hue, red. Her works are sculptural paintings, or painterly sculptures—twisted, draped, and bound fiber that is dyed and painted. They are hard to pinpoint because she has created her own artistic language. Arguably, she is the leading artist who is moving the needle in fiber, painting, and sculpture, all wrapped up in one. She is also preparing for a museum presentation at the Bo Bartlett Center from August through December 2026, with a larger gallery footprint, she is thinking more expansively about spatial rhythm, duration, and how viewers physically move through and between the work. “I am especially interested in using color as atmosphere and shadow as a structural force,” she explains to me on a sunny afternoon.    Baird has had an extraordinary year with a major solo show in Paris with RX&SLAG and several shows with Hollis Taggart in New York, and during Miami Art Week, marking a significant expansion of her gallery presence. It’s really a big break, but to Baird, it feels less like a sudden opening and more like time finally cracking the pavement. We are in her Long Island City studio. The studio is a daily ritual for the artist, for her creation is a form of breath, like her ballet practice. Correcting me, she explains that rather than a breakthrough her work is a continuation of ongoing discipline, diligence, and an obsessive devotion to her craft.  dress Emma Krikorian  heels Christian Louboutin dress Emma Krikorian  heels Christian Louboutin  All around us are pieces from different times in Baird’s artistic career, finished and in progress, as a testament to her hard work. Her sun-drenched studio is filled with reference material as well—fabric and color swatches on hand and many museum catalogs on fashion, textiles, and art tucked away in various places. To avoid high shipping costs, ahead of her show in Paris, the gallery set her up with a local studio where she constructed a new choreography of making. Keeping a sketchbook recording color formulas, fabric techniques, title ideas, and personal notes. As she temporarily was away from her husband and very young children, Paris gave her a greater freedom, a fluid daily structure. Working under an intense deadline, the long, focused days, often seven to ten hours, and then moving through the city at night, dancing or lingering over late dinners, reminded her of her student years at RISD, when time felt expansive and porous. This sense of freedom and the city’s material palette and chromatic range — living near the Picasso Museum and the Centre Pompidou — deeply informed what became her most colorful body of work.  body suit Capezio  tights Falke  heels Christian Louboutin Embodiment, being in one’s own body, is spoken about when it comes to performance, but not often discussed when it comes to painting or sculpture; however, this grounding and playful aspect of the body is present in the art-making process. Sartorial experimentation helps guide Baird; sometimes she cosplays when she makes work—wearing period-style clothes to feel connected to her lineage and labor. “Clothing shifts posture, tempo, and emotional tone,” Baird explains.   At other times, she dresses formally to slow her gestures. Through these actions, the studio becomes a private territory where she can experiment with identity without external scrutiny. “Overall, the body is one of my most important tools; knowledge lives in muscle memory, in gesture, in rhythm, which is why I wear specific fabrics or silhouettes to harness a mood,” she continues. Having formerly worked as a clothing designer and now exploring textiles, Baird has a sophisticated understanding of fabrics, and her work delves into their composition, movement, and history. “High heels, for example, create elegance through precariousness. They reorganize the body’s relationship to gravity and time. These tensions, structure and softness, constraint and freedom, directly inform how I sculpt material,” Baird explains. In Paris, she began using the heel of a stiletto to create physical ruptures in the canvas, a gesture that is both elegant and violent. Acclaimed craft historian, Glenn Adamson described her piece Lace III, 2024 as representing the DNA of his group exhibition Drop, Cloth, as her work reveals rather than conceals the substrate, one of the conceptual bases of his show.  This new monochromatic body of work explores lace, explores

Changing Black Voices Curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton This April, curator and gallerist Destinee Ross-Sutton will present a special exhibition at the 20th anniversary of Market Art Fair in Stockholm, marking six years since her groundbreaking exhibition “Black Voices/Black Microcosm.” The presentation coincides with a concurrent show at her new Stockholm gallery, revisiting the ideas that helped shift global attention toward contemporary Black art.   Ross-Sutton first emerged as a leading voice during the 2020–21 season after curating three influential exhibitions: “Black Voices/Black Microcosm” at CFHILL in Stockholm (8 April–9 May 2020), the only physical exhibition to open as the world shut down due to Covid-19; “Black Voices: Friend of My Mind,” her inaugural gallery exhibition in New York; and the widely discussed “Say it Loud” series at Christie’s New York.   The Stockholm exhibition closed just 13 days before the killing of George Floyd sparked the global Black Lives Matter movement. Arriving at a pivotal moment when interest in contemporary art from the African diaspora was accelerating, these exhibitions helped expand the artistic canon and the art world’s commitment to artists of color. Since then, Ross-Sutton—splitting her time between New York and Stockholm—has continued to curate and advise independently.   “Honestly, I personally do not like too much attention,” she says when we meet for her third interview with Odalisque. “I prefer the work to speak for itself.” Often described as a visionary curator and tastemaker, Ross-Sutton has built a reputation for championing emerging artists—particularly young and underrepresented artists of color and female artists—often giving them their first gallery exhibition or international debut, something that most commercial galleries deem to “risky” financially. She is also an advocate for artists’ rights, implementing resale restrictions in her sales agreements since 2021 to help support a more sustainable secondary market. Her curatorial work spans major international platforms. She internationally debuted Khari Turner during the 59th Venice Biennale and co-curated “4000+ Years of African Art” at the Wall House Museum on St. Barths. Artists including Kehinde Wiley, Amoako Boafo, Tim Okamura and new stars like Vanessa Raw, have cited her as a muse, inspired by her dedication to reshaping the art world. “EARL”. Deborah Roberts. Image courtesy of the artist.  Through her foundation, Black Artist Collective, Ross-Sutton supports emerging African artists, LGBTQ+ artists, and women artists. Her 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition “Unapologetic WomXn: The Dream is the Truth” brought together thirty-four artists aged 25 to 89 exploring female sexuality and identity through the female gaze. The project grew out of conversations she began in 2021 with her husband about the complexity of womanhood—shaped by culture, race, economics, politics, and social expectations.   Continuing to prioritize international female and underrepresented voices, Ross-Sutton remains committed to a globally engaged program. On her opening her first gallery outside New York, Market Art Fair Director and CEO Sara Berner Bengtsson says, “I think you will contribute so much to the Stockholm art scene.”     We meet the 30-year-old curator on her way back to New York after the Cape Town Art Fair, making a brief stop in Stockholm for the opening of “Listening to Light” with Iranian painter Rey Hosseini. Born in Tehran, Hosseini describes the portraits as reflections of self-examination. Created in the aftermath of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the exhibition resonates with ongoing struggles for women’s rights in Iran.     Ross-Sutton’s Stockholm gallery opened in 2025 with “A New Beginning,” featuring Somali painter Najaax Harun and Sudanese-Somali ceramicist Dina Nur Satti—artists connected to regions long shaped by political unrest.                   Alongside curating and collecting internationally, she advises institutions and collectors on acquisitions, particularly contemporary African and African American art, but not limited to. Artists remain central to her approach. “I’m pretty much the complete opposite of 95% of the individuals at these art fairs,” she says with a laugh, with her colorful braids and being a young Black female. Born in Harlem in 1995, Ross-Sutton closed her first six-figure deal at Art Basel Miami Beach at age 23, placing works by Yinka Shonibare and Deborah Roberts with a foundation. Growing up in Harlem in the 1990s and early 2000s shaped her worldview. She left journalism studies in 2016, disillusioned with sensationalist media and convinced that curating exhibitions could have a deeper cultural impact. Her return to Stockholm was symbolic, marking five years since “Black Voices/Black Microcosm,” which brought together 31 artists from the African diaspora and introduced Scandinavian audiences to voices such as Amoako Boafo alongside artists who had never exhibited internationally. photography Jheyda McGarrell “Suspended Lotus”. Dina Nur Satti. Image courtesy of the artist. August 5th, 2023 (In Memoriam)”.Jordan Zayas Kelly.Image courtesy of the artist. Naomi Osaka and The Divine Mother”. Vanessa German. Image courtesy of the artist.   The project was followed by “Say it Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud” at Christie’s in summer 2020, amid global protests against racism and police brutality, and later by “Black Voices – Friend of My Mind” her inaugural show at her New York gallery—then the largest exhibition dedicated to contemporary Black art in the United States.In total, fifteen artists—twelve female and three male—are included, with smaller works presented at the fair and larger pieces shown at the gallery.   Joshua Adokuru (Nigeria) – Rita Mawuena Benissan (Ghana) – Amoako Boafo (Ghana) – Phoebe Boswell (Kenya/UK) – Cydne Coleby (Bahamas) – vanessa german (US) – Najaax Harun (Somaliland) – Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow (Gambia/Sweden) – Jordan Zayas Kelly (US/UK) – Turiya Magadlela (South Africa) – Buqaqawuli Nobakada (South Africa) – Deborah Roberts (US) – Dina Nur Satti (Sudan/Somalia) – Larissa de Souza (Brazil) – Khari Turner (US).   “Artists reflect the times we live in,” Ross-Sutton says. “Otherwise, is it not simply decoration? Art should make you feel—it can provoke peace or shake you, asking you to confront your ideas.” Yellow Nails”.Amoako Boafo.Image courtesy of the artist Opening of “Listening to Light”. Destinee Ross-Sutton and Rey Hosseini. ROSS-SUTTON GALLERY, Artillerigatan 8, 114 51 Stockholm