It’s finally here again. Curated by Joa Ljungberg and Santiago Mostyn, the 2018 edition of The Moderna Exhibition presents the work of nearly forty artists connected to the Swedish art scene, offering both sober and intimate reflections on Swedish society today, on a natural world that is no longer what it once was, and a future that appears to have already begun.

The Moderna Exhibition is a large-scale project that the museum presents once every four years. Several artists in the 2018 edition look back at Swedish history and explore the events that have shaped and reshaped society. Other artists highlight alternative experiences of living in Sweden today. And in the midst of these local standpoints, the exhibition incorporates geographically distant perspectives that, in different ways, impact our lives here and now.

The human body is tangibly present throughout the exhibition – surveilled and registered, caught between legal and geographic boundaries, and shaped by ideologies, technologies, power structures and norms. Also palpable are the remnants of nature, transformed beyond recognition to make way for vast industrial tracts of land where time passes ever more rapidly.

In a more hopeful direction, we encounter the search for an existence and a sexuality unencumbered by patriarchy, consumerism, and religious heritage, with new approaches to understanding oneself as a more integral part of a cosmological whole. The hierarchy of man, animal and plant is reinterpreted and renegotiated in novel ways, opening up the potential for imaginative new forms of communal understanding.

The Moderna Exhibition is a recurring exhibition format featuring between thirty and fifty artists. Once every four years, you are invited to experience a comprehensive presentation of important aspects of the contemporary Swedish art scene. The first edition of The Moderna Exhibition took place in 2006 and this fourth edition will feature both a major exhibition and a rich programme of performances, film screenings, and artist talks.