Bonniers Konsthall explores fragile notions of shelter, home and refuge

What does it mean to seek shelter? For those of us fortunate enough to live in peace and have the means, shelter is home—a place of safety, sanctuary, permanence perhaps. But for many, sadly too many, shelter carries other, more painful meanings: a marker of dislocation, of homes gone, of safety, memory, and love lost. Shelter can also be the site of quiet renewal—a space where peace begins to settle, where new memories are invited in. A place for new loves and new lives.

“That Which Carried Me” at Bonniers Konsthall gently holds these layered ideas in tension. The group exhibition at the Stockholm contemporary art space brings together six international artists whose works respond to the concept of shelter in ways that are visceral, poetic, and at times deeply unsettling. Across sculpture, sound, kinetic installations, and earth-bound materials, it explores how power, politics, gender, memory and climate shape, and often shift, our sense of belonging.

The idea grew from an ongoing interest in how we seek shelter and protection (physically, emotionally, politically, materially), especially in times of uncertainty and flux, explains the senior curator, Yuvinka Medina. “I began with the idea of shelter as both a structural necessity and an intimate, lived experience. From there, I sought out artists whose practices could enrich and complicate this framework.”

She describes the exhibition as an exploration of how structures built for safety often expose their own fragility—and how protection is frequently bound up with exclusion and boundaries. “In this context, sculpture becomes more than form—it acts as a vessel for memory, reflection and feeling. It may appear as a monument to a lost home, a body in flux, or a space for care and resistance.”

Some of the artists had been long-standing figures in Medina’s research; others surfaced through more recent conversations. What connects them is a shared material sensitivity—a tactile, process-led approach to ideas of vulnerability, migration, care and transformation. “I was committed to gathering perspectives from across geographies and experiences,” she says.

“Most of these artists had never exhibited in Sweden before, and it was important for me to introduce their voices to a new context. The curatorial direction was guided by a strong desire to work with women and non-binary artists whose practices sit at the intersection of the personal and the political, and who approach their work through embodied, materially driven methodologies.”

Mire Lee’s “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love” (2024) is both tender and disquieting. Working between Seoul and Amsterdam, her practice occupies a space between the mechanical and the visceral, the kinetic sculptures tend to pulse with raw emotion. At Bonniers Konsthall, with its low mechanical rhythm and amorphous forms, the sculpture breathes and shudders in a space that feels eerily alive—a shelter of desire, decay, and instability. Here, the body is part-machine, part-organism.

“A body that rots is a body that has lived, that has been touched, held, connected,” she explains in an interview with the curator. “There is something deeply erotic and archaic about the inevitability of breakdown—about the way we dissolve into each other, into time, into the world.”

In another space, Puerto Rican artist Mariana Ramos Ortiz responds to shelter through the lens of architectural fragility. Her sand-based installations, “Estudio de una Tormentera (182 Picaflor)” and “Breezeblocks (Derrumbe),” both completed in 2023, call attention to the illusion of permanence in places shaped by environmental trauma.

Sand, breeze blocks, storm shutters—these are materials of survival and exclusion, shaped by the hurricanes that regularly devastate her homeland. Her work is quiet yet potent, mapping collective memory and the ongoing violence of colonial and climate disruption.

Brazilian-German artist Wisrah C.V. da R. Celestino turns to questions of exchange and authorship. “Rental/Father” (2023) involves building gates loaned from the artist’s father, with the gallery mediating the agreement.

“Privacy” (2023) features curtains on loan from friends and family in Brazil, with the promise of return at the show’s end. These subtle performative interventions question ideas of art ownership and value, offering shelter as a relational and negotiated act—a space built not just from material, but from trust.

While curating the exhibition, Medina felt it was essential to include local voices—selecting Swedish artist Åsa Cederqvist, whose layered, mid-career practice warrants broader recognition.

In “The Cabinet” (2010–2025), the artist presents shelter as both a physical and emotional vessel. Constructed in collaboration with Medina for the show, the cabinet becomes a metaphor for body and mind—a container for memory, for emotional sediment, for the trace elements of being. Cederqvist’s wider practice moves fluidly between sculpture, film and performance, often working with instability, rawness, and transformation. Her installations blur the lines between body and object, intellect and instinct, so we can consider what it means to be in flux.

Narges Mohammadi’s work feels particularly poignant. Born in Afghanistan, taking refuge first in neighboring Iran and then the Netherlands, where she is now based, hers is an intimate understanding of shelter as a matter of urgency—of necessity. Her installations made from straw, clay and earth speak to the impermanence of refuge.

Explains Medina, “Materials were central to the exhibition’s language: porous textiles, oxidized metals, reclaimed wood, and pliable clay carried with them narratives of shelter, loss, and endurance. These material choices reinforced one of the exhibition’s central propositions—that fragility, rather than weakness, can be what carries us through change.

In “Attempts for Refuge” (2021), childhood memories of displacement are carved into walls and floors. In “That Which Carried Me” shelter is not a structure but a journey, something we carry, lose, rebuild. “My work is more guardian than master,” she says. “It’s an act of waiting—an intimate exchange where I listen rather than push.” Mohammadi works with materials that disintegrate, for instance halva, soap, letting their ephemerality echo the fragility of memory. “These are not passive materials. They press back and remind me that nothing ever holds its shape for long.”

“That Which Carried Me” is on at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm until June 15, 2025.

For more art around Stockholm see Market Art Fair here.