Land Escapes brings together five young Swedish artists whose practices explore shifting ideas of landscape, spatiality, and identity. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and moving image, the exhibition reflects on how environments, both physical and imagined, are constructed, experienced, and remembered.
Landscape representations have been part of art for millennia, becoming an independent genre in the seventeenth century and peaking in the nineteenth, as industrialisation, urban growth and colonialism reshaped society. These forces deepened the divide between “nature” as resource and “culture” as human achievement, while also casting landscape as a projection of national identity. Factories, railways and empires spread, and nature became both a territory to exploit and an image to preserve — a tension critically examined in the Anthropocene.
Today, the question of landscape remains just as urgent. As accelerating climate change reshapes ecosystems, it is driven not only by visible industries but also by the invisible infrastructures of our time. The rapid growth of digital technologies demands ever more energy-hungry data centers and server farms, linking our daily online lives to rising carbon emissions. The horizon of the landscape is no longer only physical, but also digital, carrying the weight of climate futures.
As a concept and artistic motif, nature still functions as a mirror of contemporary cultural, political, and spiritual beliefs. It is in this terrain – between history and now, the personal and the collective, that the five artists in this exhibition situate their practices. Land Escapes explores the realism–abstraction spectrum and the understanding of space through contemporary Swedish art.
Rudolf Nordström’s (b. 1990) practice can be traced back to a historic plein air tradition, where light and colour are created in direct dialogue with the natural world. His landscapes, often without human presence, merge atmospheric sensitivity with a contemporary reflection on our relationship to the Nordic environment.
Fredrik Åkum’s (b. 1987) practice revolves around processes of repetition and displacement, where each layer and reproduction push the image further from its point of origin. Åkum contributes a series of paintings in which rhythm and surface engage with abstraction while anchoring the viewer in a more intimate sense of space.
Olle Helin (b. 1993) has worked with pigments sourced from Falun copper mine. The mine, in operation for nearly a thousand years, produced two-thirds of the world’s copper in the 17th century, and is the birthplace of Sweden’s famous Faluröd paint. Using found pigments, minerals, and fragments from his surroundings, he creates subtle chromatic studies that trace connections between place, memory, and material.
Philip Dufva (b. 1993) turns architectural forms into sculptural gestures, working in concrete, steel, and found materials, to trace bodies, encounters, and the movements of space. Drawing on the legacy of modernism, his practice reflects on how our surroundings both structure and neglect everyday life. Fragile, shifting forms probe the cracks and in-betweens, where intimacy surfaces and estrangement takes hold.
Nicole Khadivi (b. 1998) draws on her background in film to explore time as both spiral and fragment. In her work, cinematic duration is translated into physical space, where light, glass, and movement unfold as slowed sequences. Her installations become acts of developing, of memory, image, and place, while opening philosophical questions of identity, perception, and belonging.
Together, these five practices create a constellation of notes and impressions that reflect a generational approach to landscape, identity, and abstraction.
Land Escapes, curated by Jesper Dahl and Ebba Wallmén, offers a glimpse into voices shaping Sweden’s contemporary art scene today.
Written by Karolina Aastrup,
Co-Artistic Director, Triennalen 2025
Curator, Sörmlands Museum
