It is with great joy that skēnē welcomes you to Negative Space, an exhibition by Marianne Heier. Expanding from Heier’s multi-year research project La Passione, the exhibition centers the visual, political, and bodily legacies of Italian radical feminism, thus bridging these archives and interventions within a Nordic context.

Against a backdrop of resurging fascisms, Negative Space becomes a site for collective counter-narratives and urgent structural resistance. Here, further voices are drawn into the space, encompassing works by Bingöl Elmas and Stephanie Oursler, alongside a dedicated tribute to Gina Pane. Joining them as a tactile counterpart is Aristotle’s Masterpiece – a centuries-old, subversive book using a patriarch’s name as a camouflage to preserve the autonomous bodily knowledge of midwives and healers.

Marianne Heier (b. 1969) is a visual artist based in Oslo, Norway, educated at the Fine Art Academies in Milan and Oslo. Utilizing methodologies borrowed from activism, theater, and anthropology, Heier explores the distribution of resources, power dynamics, and the political potential of generosity and exchange. Her work is manifested through performance, text, installation, objects, photography, video, and architectural interventions.

Heier has exhibited extensively at institutions including the National Museum (Oslo), Munch Museum, Kunstnernes Hus, Henie Onstad Art Center, Malmö Konstmuseum, and CAPC Bordeaux. She has also produced prominent public art commissions for KORO and the Norwegian Scenic Routes. In 2012, she was the featured artist for the Bergen International Festival Exhibition, and in 2013, she was awarded the Lorck Schive Art Prize.

Negative Space is supported by OCA, Kulturrådet, Malmö Stad and Region Skåne.

It is a great pleasure to invite you to the opening of I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead! On Friday, May 8, both skēnē and Teater Augusten are activated as we gather around a program exploring the foundations of communal life. Through the lens of the festive, the evening centers the transformative potential of sound as a site for collective resistance and celebration.

The event marks a continuation and expansion of the inquiry into the politics of the party, first initiated with the exhibition Lost Vessel at Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus in 2024. Centered around Beatrice Gibson’s film I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead from 2018, the evening is a collaboration with the ambulatory platform and live series Scaling, bridging the gallery space with the rhythmic collectivity of the dance floor. As the night unfolds, we migrate from skēnē to Scaling (Teater Augusten) for a series of live performances and a DJ set.

Beatrice Gibson (skēnē)
Developed with poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles, the film I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead weaves global political upheaval; from the Mediterranean crisis to the Grenfell fire, into the intimate fabric of Gibson’s own domestic life. The film explores the power of ritual to navigate a world of perilous authority. Carried by a soundtrack by Pauline Oliveros, the work proposes intimacy and empathy as vital tools for moving through contemporary chaos.

Beatrice Gibson (1978) lives and works in London, UK and Palermo, IT. Resolutely feminist in form and content, Gibson explores the personal and the political, and draws on cult figures from experimental literature and poetry, from Kathy Acker to Gertrude Stein. Collapsing fiction and documentary, and liquefying both, Beatrice Gibson’s films range from experimental autobiography to nocturnal thriller. They cast friends and influences as their characters and co creators; with collaboration and credit at their heart.

Centrum för kritiska fritidsstudier (skēnē)
Centrum för kritiska fritidsstudier [Centre for Free Time Studies] maps the conditions of leisure and work to enable spaces for meaningful rest and collective joy. Initiated in 2025, the collective’s practice manifests through editorial experiments, temporary events, and site-specific interventions. Their work navigates the shifting boundaries between care and control and the spaces required to cultivate skills beyond the dictates of economy, labor, and the nuclear family.

At skēnē, they present Återta rekreationsmedlen 1 and Återta rekreationsmedlen 2. Centered on archival records of the 1890 takeover of a carpentry workshop in Kristianstad; the site of Sweden’s first Folkets hus, and the establishment of Malmö’s Folkets park in 1891; the first of its kind in the country, the works serve as a reminder that the struggle for another world is always spatially situated.

Rat Section (Teater Augusten)
Rat Section are a music and performance act currently based in London. Recent shows include:  ‘Press Conference’ at ICA London, ‘Press Conference II’ at Lafayette Anticipations Paris and ‘Back Up vol. II’ at Tanzquartier Vienna.

Stuart Mckenzie (Teater Augusten)
Stuart McKenzie is an artist, illustrator, poet and musician. His work explores the performance of self through materiality, manifested through painting, poetry, performance and objects. McKenzie recently exhibited at Arcadia Missa (for Galerina), Raven Row London and Cherry Hill with 4649, Tokyo in Cologne.He was a founding member of the band Wild Daughter and his first full poetry collection The Dead Weight of Beauty was recently published by Joan Publishing.

Lukas Danys (Teater Augusten)
Lukas is a Copenhagen-based artist and DJ working across sound, spatial practice and live formats. He is a co-founder of Rewild and TAXI CLUB, two artist-led platforms working across experimental music, performance and visual art. 

With a genre-agnostic, wide-open approach to club music, his sets drift between eras and moods, balancing the comfortless and the welcoming.

16:00–19:00: skēnē
Drottninggatan 6C

19:00–23:00: Teater Augusten / Scaling
Augustenborgsgatan 10
Entrance: 80 SEK (at Teater Augusten only)

The live event at Teater Augusten is organised with technical and media support from Retreat Radio, an independent, non-commercial radio station, broadcasting from Malmö, Scandinavia and beyond.

The exhibition and program is supported by LUX, Kulturrådet, Malmö Stad and Region Skåne.

The project takes its starting point in Birgitta Stenberg-Hultén’s and CO Hultén’s public sculpture group carrying the same name, located in Törnrosen, Rosengård. Originally conceived as an integrated water feature with four shallow basins, the work consists of four sculptural elements in concrete, steel, enamel, and mosaic. Although the water has long since been replaced by paving and the site has fallen into disrepair, the work retains a singular, evocative power.

Behind the sculpture lies an abundance of personal narratives, art historical perspectives, and a spirit of experimentation. It reflects a collective, playful process that involved the entire production chain—artists, craftspeople, and technicians alike. Their names can still be faintly discerned, etched into the concrete of one of the sculpture’s elements.

Through the work of Plattform KcSyd (Jamila Drott & Sophia Persson), the sculpture has become the subject of an inquiry into the agency and decay of public art. The publication (which will be released as part of the finissage on May 3rd) offers a closer look at Stad för lekar through a series of visits conducted between 2019 and 2025. By observing the work across different seasons and stages of decay, the project examines the dual value of this public heritage as an art historical artefact as well as a vital resource for contemporary artistic practice.

The exhibition brings together the duo Stenberg-Hulténs’ unique documentation of the production process (1964–1967) alongside contemporary interventions by artists Cia Kanthi and Ingrid Furre. The publication is made in collaboration with skēnē and is designed by Studio Hanna Bergman.

On Sunday, April 26th, the program continues with a tour of the original sculpture led by artist and skēnē project manager Anna Zingmark. The tour is geared towards children, but all ages are welcome. It will be held in Swedish and starts in Törnrosen at 14:00. The following Sunday, May 3rd, there will be a joint celebration of both the exhibition and publication Stad för lekar (1967) as we combine the finissage with the publication release.

Plattform KcSyd is an artistic and curatorial platform working to highlight, challenge and promote artistic work within societal development and public spaces. Founded by members of Konstnärscentrum Syd, Plattform KcSyd aims to promote new perspectives that enrich the discourse surrounding contemporary public art.

Stad för lekar (1967) is supported by Kulturrådet, Region Skåne and Malmö Stad.

Two readings will take place during the vernissage:
At 16:15 in Swedish and at 18:00 in English.
The doors will remain closed while the readings take place (16:15–16:45 and 18:00–18:30). Please arrive on time.

Additional readings will take place on 21 March and 11 April. More information to follow soon.

skēnē are proud to present Magnificent Desolation, an exhibition by artist Susanna Marcus Jablonski in collaboration with playwright Eva Maria Benavente Dahlin.

Magnificent Desolation unfolds as a performance within a staged spatial environment where language, image, and topography converge. It reflects an expansion of Susanna Marcus Jablonski’s sculptural practice, where ‘sculpture’ is not only located in discrete objects but also in the conditions that host the convening of objects and bodies in physical space.

The body of work originates in a script written together with Eva Maria Benavente Dahlin, and centres on a drawing made in the 1940’s by an imprisoned child that depicts the Earth as seen from the Moon. The narrative traces the drawing’s afterlife as it outlives its maker and becomes entangled in histories of displacement, technological ambition and cultural memory, resonating across multiple temporalities and geographies. Acting as a sculptural force, the drawing carries histories beyond what can be physically present.

The exhibition Magnificent Desolation is supported by Byggfabriken, Kulturrådet, Malmö stad, Region Skåne and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee

Metrics of Care brings together fragments, measurements, and residual sounds from previous exhibitions as a way of thinking about artistic labour and attention.

Together, these elements reflect Bengtsson’s ongoing investigation into standardisation, labour, and the conditions under which art is produced, understood and sustained.

Kristina Bengtsson (b 1979, Lund, SE) lives in Copenhagen.

Through a multidisciplinary practice that spans photography, sculpture, text, and artist books, Bengtsson’s work engages with critical themes of labour, autonomy, and the body. At its core, her practice interrogates the structures and systems that govern how we work, live, and relate to one another, with a particular focus on the standardisation and commodification of both human labour and artistic production.

Recent exhibitions include Kristina Bengtsson, Bradley Kronz, Lawrence Weiner, skēnē; Whatever works, Alta Art Space; Searching for comfort in an uncomfortable room, Vermilion Sands, DK: Du Jag Someone Something, Bladr, DK; Wasted, Tørreloft, DK; Zoning, SIC Space, FI, What we are working with, Künstlerhaus AU.

The exhibition brings together two photographic series and a singular work that explore, through distinct yet interrelated approaches, photography’s relationship to time, perception, atmosphere, and presence.

Through the repeated photographing of the same clock tower at a fixed time of day over the course of more than a year, as well as through a close examination of variations in materiality, quality, and length among a set of found school rulers—where a nominal measure of thirty centimetres unfolds into multiple actual dimensions—Olof Nimar’s practice articulates an interval between standardisation and lived experience. Within this interval, everyday objects and situations are endowed with an intensified resonance, as contingency and chance are gathered, oriented, and condensed through the cumulative logic of repetition.

The images sustain a tension between containment and continuity: between photography’s capacity to delimit a condition and the persistent flow of time. Meaning emerges through relational structures, generated by the interplay among the image’s constituent elements, rather than through the capture of a singular, self-contained moment.

before this, until then presents photography as a temporal and spatial field in which time and extension are measured, displaced, and intensified, rendering the image an active site of duration.

Olof Nimar (b. 1985) is an artist based in Malmö. He has studied at the Braunschweig Academy of Fine Arts and the Malmö Art Academy, where he graduated in 2011. Nimar has participated in several exhibitions in Sweden and internationally, including Andys Gallery, Stockholm; Bienvenue Art, Paris; Ystad Konstmuseum; Olseröds Konsthall; Galleri Format, Malmö; Goya Curtain, Tokyo; BiquiniWax, Mexico City and Trondheim Kunstmuseum.

Guinness World Records Audio Guide to Her by Oda Haugerud examines how sound and noise are politicised and gendered — how voice, body, and emotion are shaped, instrumentalised, and commodified within contemporary culture. Through sculpture, installation, and sound, Haugerud explores the entanglement of power and audio, and how external, often conflicting conditions define the contours of selfhood.

Materially and conceptually, Haugerud’s works are anchored in everyday experience. Employing humour as a critical strategy, she reconfigures rock’n’roll clichés and the aesthetics of self-consumption. Sculptural elements, including parts of guitars built from debris collected at shuttered New York City rock clubs, evoke cycles of excess and collapse, romance and decay. These gestures transform the remnants of popular culture into instruments of reflection and critique.

Guinness World Records Audio Guide to Her considers listening as both a site of control and of resistance. The exhibition addresses how sound mediates emotion, power, and belonging, and how humour and critical reflection can reintroduce agency in a culture increasingly defined by performance and commodified affect.

The ultimate audio guide to noise-cancelling culture post everything.

Oda Haugerud is a Malmö based artist educated at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands and at Malmö Art Academy. She has exhibited widely, both locally and internationally, in solo and group presentations. The works in Guinness World Records Audio Guide to Her are produced especially for skēnē.

The exhibition is supported by Kulturrådet and Malmö stad.

THE SPONTANEOUS DANCE FALLS is an ongoing artistic research project, which scrutinizes the politics surrounding gestures of collective gathering through the myth of Frau Troffea, the dancing plague of 1518, and the recently abandoned ‘danstillståndet’ or ‘dancing permit’ (1956–2023).

Through the allusion of a dancing woman who may never have existed, the body of work explores various moments of collectivity, myth, mutation, rhythm, hysteria, restriction and exhaustion. Through historical fragments encompassing the medieval period to today, de Voe attempts to understand the relation of dance (movement) and the dance floor as historical expressions of socialist world building and potential arenas of future utopias.

Spanning across sound, image, installation and performance, Stacey de Voe assesses how our relations to one another have been limited by privatisation and exclusion, where the spontaneity of the ‘public realm’ has depended on our capacity to absorb the effects of labour and restriction on our bodies without ever seeming to tire.

The exhibition at skēnē builds on previous paragraphs previously shown at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, Stockholm and Simian, Copenhagen.

We gnawed on stones to open up a space for jasmine.
Mahmoud Darwish – We Were Without a Present, 1999

Jasmine Petals is a new solo exhibition by Sahar Seyedian, presented at skēnē and curated together with visual artist and author Melanie Kitti. Developed specifically for the gallery, the exhibition explores the conditions of art making in times of global crisis, weaving together themes of resistance, longing, and cultural memory.

Through a total installation Jasmine Petals transforms the space into an immersive environment where personal and political histories intersect. The exhibition reflects on the ongoing impacts of colonisation in Southwest Asia, while inviting viewers into a sensory experience of resilience and belonging. Jasmine Petals is at the same time a gesture of remembrance and a call to collective reflection—an offering of beauty forged from struggle.

Sahar Seyedian is an Iranian visual artist living and working in Oslo, where she studied at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Khashayar Naderehvandi.

Saturday May 3, 15.00–17.00, we invite you to a gathering and poetry reading that will take place in the exhibition. Readings by Shadi Angelina Bazeghi, Athena Farrokhzad and Khashayar Naderehvandi.

The exhibition and poetry reading is supported by Kulturrådet, Malmö stad, OCA Norway and Region Skåne.