Curatorial Text:

What is the nature of your own family’s history? Surely, it is a history of security and love, pain and reconciliation, drama and peace? All the things that have shaped you and the life you lead.

In the spring of 2026, an exhibition about the family ‘Family – For Better or Worse’ is set to open at Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum. This exhibition offers an account of how our identities and personal histories are shaped by our families.

Paintings, photographs, sculptures, and contemporary expressions all present depictions of the relationships that made us who we are. Together, works by classic pioneers and contemporary greats portray the family that each of us belongs to.

CURATORIAL TEXT

Tuija Lindström (1947–2017) is one of the most influential photographers in the Nordic countries and a key figure in contemporary photography. Born in Kotka, Finland and based in Stockholm from the early 1970s, her work explores the body and human experience, engaging with questions of representation and gender.

Over the course of her career, Lindström developed a distinct visual language marked by a charged, often unsettling atmosphere. Her carefully composed images move between the intimate and the symbolic, shaped by a strong poetic sensibility. Light — subtle yet precise — plays a central role in shaping these atmospheres.

This exhibition focuses on her most iconic works from the 1980s and early 1990s, a period in which her practice reached a particular clarity and intensity, including intimate portraits and carefully composed images of landscapes and places. The title Perhaps a Dream reflects an in-between state, where reality and imagination, presence and absence, are held in suspension.

She gained wide recognition in the early 1990s with Girls at Bull’s Pond, presented here through a video work. Figures float in dark water, held between rest and threat, presence and disappearance. The women do not pose for the viewer, but seem enclosed within themselves, inhabiting their own bodies and inner worlds. Shown alongside images of iron soles, the works introduce a quiet undercurrent of violence. The dense, almost liquid darkness brings to mind the developing fluids of the darkroom and the material conditions of photography. Questions of life and death, and of the relationship between humanity and nature, are central to the series and recur throughout her work.

The exhibition also includes works from the later series Nepenthes Laughing (2010), where enlarged carnivorous plants suggest a meeting point between attraction and entrapment, marking a shift from capturing moments toward a more conceptual construction of the image. Rooted in something deeply personal, Nepenthes Laughing evokes a nature that seems to turn against itself.

Her work is held in major public collections, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, among others.

With thanks to the Tuija Lindström Association.

The exhibition ‘With us at the center of our world’ takes its title from John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?”. It features multiple strands for visitors to think through our relationship with non-human animals, addressing domestication, colonialism, extinction, conservation, and the toll humans extract from our co-habitants on earth.

Annika Eriksson’s ‘The Community’ features a carpet with several street cats in Turkey, opening a space for us to consider the roles and responsibilities of domestication and the possibility of creating new spaces for humans and animals to gather.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Horário Nobre
A MAIOR
Viseu

Horário Nobre shows wobbly grass, a person tripping over, a sports car, butterflies, high heels, a fast walker, a spinning figurine, a haunted hand, four extremities, a beautiful siren, hovering over the movie posters of Pearl Harbour and Perfect Storm, a glass of water, a staircase, a WWII soldier turned self-help guru, bootlegged video art, a commercial for AA Records, a promotional video for Scrapheap Services, people in tears, freaking out in public transit, Jesus, Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, lip- syncing, running through office corridors, lava lamps, leather jackets, a-line skirts, RGB colours, a humongous pencil, boots, nail polish, The Ring Two, Signs, Chinatown, After Chinatown, film noir, a fedora, wavy blonde hair, alleyways, the closing ceremony of the 1980 Olympic Games, Norah Jones, more people crying, being by the beach, two humanoids, and a video camera.

Special thanks to all the artists, Bonny Poon, Carlos/Ishikawa, dépendance, DREI, EXILE, Filmform, Galerie Tenko Presents, Josey, Lars Friedrich, and Thomas Dane Gallery.