Theresa Traore Dahlberg

Overview

Theresa Traore Dahlberg is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice unfolds through installation, sculpture, photography and film. Her work constructs layered and resonant narratives that engage material, history and futurity. Traore Dahlberg’s sculpture often begins with the material itself—understood not only as a physical substance but as a vessel of social, political and cultural memory. Through these investigations, she examines shifting systems of value shaped by industrial and technological transformation. Her practice is informed by her lived experience between two sociopolitical contexts: Sweden and Burkina Faso.

Her installations, glass works and bronze sculptures emerge from historically and personally charged materials that are subjected to processes of transformation, acquiring renewed significance in the process. Hand-spun cotton yarns and industrial circuit boards, for example, are melted and fused into glass, reconfiguring discarded or obsolete matter into new forms and purposes. Drawing inspiration from science fiction, futurism and African folktales, her bronze sculptures—often depicting birds and hares—speculate on alternative futures and reimagined sociopolitical structures.

Theresa Traore Dahlberg (b.1983 in Värnamo, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. She studied 16 mm experimental film at The New School in New York and at the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, and received her Master of Fine Art from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2017. In 2019, she was awarded the Beckers Art Award, which included two major solo exhibitions at Färgfabriken, Stockholm and Höganäs Museum, Höganäs, Sweden.

Recent solo exhibitions include Carl Eldhs Ateljémuseum, Stockholm (2025); The Glass Factory Boda, Sweden (2024); Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden (2021); Institut Suédois, Paris (2019); and Musée National du Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Stockholm Cosmologies, Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm (2025–26); Helsinki Biennial (2025); OFF Biennale, Cairo (2023); Un/Seen Spectres, Barbican, London (2023); and Rock my Soul II, curated by Isaac Julien, Stockholm (2022).

Traore Dahlberg is the recipient of the Tempo Documentary Short Award for The Ambassador’s Wife (2018), which was featured at the Toronto International Film Festival and was subsequently screened at Berlin Critics’ Week, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival. The film was also selected for Artist Films International, and exhibited at institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, Hammer Museum, Istanbul Modern, Bonniers Konsthall, Ballroom Marfa and Para/Site Art Space. Her earlier films, Taxi Sisters (2011) and the feature-length documentary Ouaga Girls (2017), remain widely exhibited internationally.

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