Works by Theresa Traore Dahlberg is presented in Stockholm Cosmologies, a group exhibition that focuses on the international and cosmopolitan nature of the city’s contemporary art scene. The exhibition brings together fifteen artists working across various media such as video, performance, installation, sculpture, painting, and textiles.
The exhibition features the artists Filippa Arrias, Igshaan Adams, Karim Boumjimar, Loulou Cherinet, Theresa Traore Dahlberg, Garth Erasmus, Sara-Vide Ericson, Salad Hilowle, Bronwyn Katz, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Kayo Mpoyi, Pia Sandström, Inga Somdyala, Ylva Snöfrid and Lefifi Tladi.
Stockholm Cosmologies represents a constellation of relations across geographies and temporalities. These contact zones are historic as well as temporary—in some cases fleeting, in others sustained through memory, and often overlapping. One contact zone stems from the diplomatic relations between Sweden and the South African government in exile during the 1970s and 1980s, a relationship rooted in solidarity and kinship.
However, the exhibition resists the framing of an historic set of relations. Other considerations are the lived lives of artists and the liminal aspects of being situated in-between two geographies. The practice of South African-born artist Lefifi Tladi, and his life of exile, existing between Sweden and South Africa, is a departure point for the curatorial journey. Queerness is a zone of contact, as are the legacies of Dutch colonial violence, linking artists from the southern tip of Africa to the Carribbean, and returning to Sweden.
Stockholm Cosmologies takes as its starting point the concept of cosmology, not in its scientific sense, but rather as a poetic and political model for how artists relate to the world, time, place, material, and to one another. A cosmology can be seen as a worldview, an inner map or an artistic orientation. In speaking of cosmologies in the plural, the exhibition seeks to illuminate the myriad expressions that take place in artists’ studios, as well as the unexpected parallels, ruptures, and reflections that can arise between artists who have neither met nor heard of each other, and who work on different continents.
For more information, please visit Liljevalchs website.
