World in My Eyes

Jonathas de Andrade

Thursday 17 October 2024

In his recent work, “Na Cidade da Ressaca” (In the Hangover City, 2023), Jonathas de Andrade portrays Recife, Brazil, where he lives today (born in Maceió, 1982). The work follows Recife inhabitants, reflecting the place as a significant influence on Jonathas’ political and historical understanding and his formation as an artist. Jonathas engages with memory and how it affects objects and symbols in Brazilian society. His primary mediums—installation, photography, and video—serve as tools to delve into the impacts of relationships and forms through the consequences of urbanization and power.

Through his work, de Andrade scrutinizes the resonances of modernist culture in Brazilian society, particularly in light of the repressive politics in Brazil during the 20th century. His engagement with Brazilian modernism, which frequently juxtaposed indigenous and African elements with modernist aesthetics, situates him within a legacy of artists confronting a colonial past and its contemporary continuities.

Since 2007, de Andrade has collaborated with the artist collective A Casa como Convém (The House as It Should Be), which he co-founded in Recife. One of his notable works is the mural “Nostalgia, a Class Sentiment” (Nostalgia, Sentimiento de Clase, 2012), which, with its geometric tiles and manifestos from the 1960s and 1970s, provokes an understanding of Brazil’s modernization projects and their failure to achieve sustainable change.

His recent solo exhibitions have been showcased at, among other institutions, the Brazilian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), MAAT Lisbon (2023), FOAM Amsterdam (2022), and MCA Chicago (2019).

Tickets: Stockholms Stadsmission

Selma Selman

Wednesday 6 November 2024
Selma Selman, born in 1991, is an artist and activist from Bihać in Bosnia and Herzegovina with Roma origin, currently living in Amsterdam.

Through performance, video installation, photography, and painting, her work draws from her own and her family’s experiences—yet always balancing the realities of biography with speculative and poetic elements. Such as in Selma Selman’s pivotal work “Mercedes Matrix” (2019), where she subtly comments on the value-making processes in the arts. The piece is a video documentation of Selman and her family publicly dismantling a Mercedes-Benz, accompanied by a piano track by Philip Glass, juxtaposing the performance of actual daily labor with the virtuosity of artistic expression.

Influenced by the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001) and the multifaceted challenges women face in today’s society, she transforms specific objects in order to highlight oppressive power structures and in the pursuit of contemporary political resistance. Selman is the founder and visionary of “Get The Heck To School,” an organization dedicated to empowering Roma girls worldwide who face societal ostracization and poverty.

Selman’s recent solo exhibitions took place at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2024); Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2024); and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023). Her work was also included in documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), and Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022).

Tickets: Stockholms Stadsmission

Salman Toor

Wednesday 26 February 2025
Salman Toor, born in 1983 in Lahore, Pakistan, is an artist based in New York. Toor’s figurative paintings—created with a signature palette of greens and soft yellows, applied in brushwork that feels at once expressive and full of movement—capture intimate moments in the lives of imagined young, brown, queer men in contemporary cosmopolitan settings. Toor often portrays familiar domestic environments where marginalized bodies find safety and comfort. Other pieces depict allegorical spaces of waiting and apprehension, exploring border crossings into potentially unwelcoming worlds.

Toor’s work is deeply reflective of his experiences and observations of identity and belonging. His paintings often delve into the complexities of navigating multiple cultures and the constant negotiation of the self within public and private spaces. Such as with Toors painting “The Star” (2019), where he captures an intimate gathering of young men in a living room, one of whom is illuminated by the soft glow of a phone screen, while others are engaged in conversation and reflection. The nuanced emotion in his characters’ faces and the intimate settings they inhabit provide a window into silent struggles and small joys of the mundane. Toor invites viewers to witness the beauty and vulnerability of these moments, challenging preconceived notions and fostering empathy and understanding.

Salman Toor has had solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2022) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020). He has participated in the Venice Biennale (2024), Lahore Biennale (2018), and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016). His painting “Night Garden” was on view as part of the group exhibition “Seven Rooms and a Garden: Rashid Johnson and Moderna Museet’s Collection” at Moderna Museet in 2023/2024.

Cecilia Vicuña

Friday 16 May 2025
Cecilia Vicuña, born in 1948, is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist from Santiago, Chile. The military coup against President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s forced her into exile, and she spent her first years in London, where she founded Artists for Democracy. She is a pioneer of conceptual art in Chile and foundational to recent developments in contemporary art in South America and beyond.

According to Vicuña, social change can occur if we treat consciousness as a form of art and art as a form of transformation. By combining traditional materials and techniques with modern aesthetics, she creates powerful works that engage with notions of time and history, land and fertility, as well as the ritualistic and the sacred. This is particularly expressed in her textile works, inspired by Chilean and Andean craft practices that she reinterprets for a contemporary context. Vicuña’s engagement with quipu—a traditional Andean textile artifact used for record-keeping—demonstrates her deep commitment to preserving Indigenous forms of knowledge and activating them today.

In 2022, Vicuña was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale and featured in notable exhibitions such as “Brain Forest Quipu” at Tate Modern in London and “Spin Spin Triangulene” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her prolific career also includes significant awards like the Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts in 2019 and the Herb Alpert Award for the Arts, alongside numerous international exhibitions documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale.