Studio visits

This spring, some of the artists represented in the Moderna Museet collection will broadcast live from their studios in Sweden and globally. Together with our curators, we will visit a few of the artists whose works were acquired for the collection in 2021.

Valeria Montti Colque

Date

9 february 2022

Language

Swedish

Annika Gunnarsson, curator at Moderna Museet, visits Valeria Montti Colque in her studio in Stockholm.

The artist Valeria Montti Colque is a storyteller. She builds imaginary worlds full of symbols, combining everyday life with myths, religion and popular culture. Many of her works are collective, using a diversity of media and techniques: drawing, painting, assemblage, installation and performance.

Valeria Montti Colque was born in 1978 in Stockholm, where she lives and works. She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in 2004. As part of the “Swedish Acquisitions 2021” project, Moderna Museet has added an extensive installation by Montti Colque to the collection.

Julia Bondesson

Date

2 march 2022

Language

Swedish

Andreas Nilsson, curator at Moderna Museet Malmö, visits Julia Bondesson in her studio in Skåne.

Julia Bondesson’s works often portray bodies and body parts charged with beauty and gloom, combining aesthetics with psychology. The carefully carved and chiselled sculptures with occasional scorch marks convey a sense of being exposed and vulnerable.

Bondesson explores the relationship and ties between body and soul. Her sources of inspiration include Chinese philosophy and learning by doing. The sculptures evolve into ambivalent characters – both objects and living beings. And maybe the permanence of the sculptures also reminds us of our own transience.

Julia Bondesson was born in 1983 and lives in north Skåne. She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2011 and has also studied hand puppetry in Taiwan and art in Japan and Thailand.

Mohammed Sami

Date

30 march 2022

Language

English

Asrin Haidari, curator at Moderna Museet and curator of Swedish Acquisitions: Insights, visits Mohammed Sami in his studio in London.

Mohammed Sami’s autobiographical paintings explore the delayed memories that can be triggered by everyday objects and surroundings. In traditional motifs such as still-lifes, interiors and landscapes, Sami links his own memories of war and trauma in his native Iraq. The suggestive, layered images are detached from the private sphere and tell a bigger story that concerns us all.

Painting is my way of finding the traces of a personal memory. Memories are remarkable, sometimes they are disguised as shadows, objects, smells, or even something banal, without revealing themselves as memories. – Mohammed Sami

Mohammed Sami was born in Bagdad, Iraq, in 1984. He studied drawing and painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, Bagdad, Iraq, in 2005, and emigrated to Sweden in 2007. In 2015, he gained an honorary degree from Ulster University – Belfast School, Northern Ireland. He has an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London (2018). Mohammed Sami lives and works in London and Norrköping.