art

photography Olivia Huerta Bratteng  Molten Glass Memories: Härkomst ~ Hågkomst by Sarah Yasdani text Kaat Van Der Linden “I hope viewers encounter the exhibition through their own sense of loss and longing. I believe we all carry lost spaces within us – places and people we can no longer return to,” says Swedish‑Persian artist Sarah Yasdani about Härkomst ~ Hågkomst. Currently on view at Galleri Glas in Stockholm, the exhibition runs from February 19 until March 19th, 2026 and explores ideas of inherited memory and the physicality of remembering. Yasdani construct what she calls a “hestorical house“”; a dreamlike structure built from fragments of her foremothers’ lives. “What matters is the quiet knowledge that memory lives in the body as much as in the mind.” photography Olivia Huerta Bratteng To bring her “herstorical house” to life, she needed a material that could, over time, fuse with an object and everything it has ever held. A need that ultimately led her to glass, through which she began exploring questions of heritage and memory. “When I first got in touch with the material, I was carried away by the sense that glass remembers,” says Yasdani. “I came to realise that the quality of glass echoed what I was already drawn to in my conceptual practice. Glass holds traces and mirrors the way heritage and memory are carried: altered by time, yet never erased.” When her grandmother passed away, each family member was asked what they wished to inherit from her now‑lost home. Yasdani was the only girl among all the grandchildren, but she was the one who had spent her childhood in the studio with her grandfather. So when they were allowed to choose something to take with them, she already knew what she wanted: “I immediately thought of the tools my grandfather and I used together. But when I arrived at the house, the tools were gone. It made me both angry and sad, because to me they carried so many memories.” Unable to take one of her grandfather’s tools, Yasdani searched for another meaningful object to bring home. Eventually, she decided to remove a threshold from the doorframe, which she later kiln-cast in glass. That threshold became the first element of Härkomst ~ Hågkomst. That threshold now holds more than just the memory of her grandmother’s house: “To me, the threshold holds time and space sealed within an in-between – where no one passes anymore, in a house that both exists and does not. Generations of movement and lived time are embedded in its surface, carrying the weight of countless footsteps. The threshold became for me both an object and a passage: a site where my origin and my memory could meet.” photography Olivia Huerta Bratteng photography Julia Nesterenko photography Julia Nesterenko photography Olivia Huerta Bratteng Using memory as a material is therapeutic for Yasdani, enabling her to keep her cultural history alive. It allows her to remain in the past while still moving forward, to inhabit what has been while shaping what is to come. “Memory is a generous material because it is endless. I never reach the bottom of the keepsake casket. Each object I open contains another layer, another echo, another fragment asking to be held. Even absence offers substance. What is missing becomes as important as what remains.” The story of her two grandmothers, who never met, forms the emotional core of the work. Their absence becomes a generative force, shaping both how and why Yasdani works. “Absence does not signify loss alone, but the possibility of an imagined connection. My grandmothers are finally able to meet; I am rippling on their waters.” Her culture lives not only in her genetic inheritance, but also in the materials she is drawn to; in what she collects, casts, shapes and preserves. Rather than trying to resolve her identity, Yasdani uses the exhibition as a way to hold it. “I grew up with Persian gestures, scents and sensibilities present in a Swedish landscape. One heritage was carried in the body: the other shaped the ground beneath my feet. In the exhibition, they move into one another.” Working on this exhibition hasn’t changed how she relates to her heritage; it has deepened it. The process has felt like moving closer to the source, like tracing her hand along the grain of something ancient and recognising it as her own. Härkomst ~ Hågkomst takes viewers through parts of Sarah Yasdani’s past, but for the artist, it also marks a transition toward something new. “While glass has always been my chosen medium, I’ve recently felt drawn to wood carving. Glass carries the presence and memories of my grandmothers, whereas wood connects me to my grandfather, who was a woodcarver. Embracing this new chapter feels like finding a way to be closer to him.” photography Julia Nesterenko photography Julia Nesterenko