Conversation in the Collection: Susanna Marcus Jablonski

The exhibition “The Subterranean Sky – Surrealism in the Moderna Museet Collection” includes nearly 200 works from the Moderna Museet Collection, all closely connected to Surrealism as an art-historical movement. The exhibition highlights the works and ideas that inspired Surrealism, as well as the influence the movement has had throughout art history and into our own time.

In this season’s second “Conversation in the Collection”, the artist Susanna Marcus Jablonski meets Lena Essling, Curator of Moving Image and Performance at Moderna Museet and curator of the exhibition “The Subterranean Sky”. Together they examine Marcus Jablonski’s work “Dov” (2020), a sculpture made of duck feathers and willow, and discuss how the work move into the realm of surrealist ideas.

André Breton and his circle in 1920s Paris described Surrealism as an inherent primal force accessible to everyone, regardless of time or place. They saw connections to the visual worlds of 16th-century artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, as well as Symbolists like Edvard Munch and Odilon Redon. It is a revolutionary movement with roots in an anarchist tradition, aiming to free people from the limitations of society and allow the subconscious to become a path beyond logic and reason.

Susanna Marcus Jablonski

Susanna Marcus Jablonski is a Stockholm-based artist whose sculptural installations explore the limits of both material and conceptual permanence. Her practice is expressed in a rhythmic interplay between materiality, abstraction, scale and historical memory.

Marcus Jablonski studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and was recently awarded the 2025 Asmund and Lizzie Arles Sculptor Prize by the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Together with Santiago Mostyn, Marcus Jablonski has been commissioned to create an anti-racist monument for the city of Malmö in 2026.