FEEL FIRST, THINK LATER - Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff, Dev Dhunsi, Minh Ngọc Nguyễn & Sally von Rosen: Stockholm
We are proud to announce the group exhibition FEEL FIRST, THINK LATER, opening on 6 March, between 17:00 – 20:00.
This group exhibition brings together three young artists at the beginning of their careers with one of the gallery’s most established artists in a dialogue about how we approach works of art. The title of the exhibition is derived from a quote by Sally von Rosen on how she would like her works to be perceived – letting the intuitive meeting with an artwork precede the intellectual interpretation of it. Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff’s The Blind Woman from 1998, depicting a woman being led by her guide dog in the night down a brightly lit staircase, takes on the role of a symbolic portal into the discussion on that act of letting go and trusting that both one’s intuition and senses leads one in the right direction.
Without wishing to force the different artistic practices into a shared narrative, there are still elements in their work which can be seen as unifying. In the respective practices of Dhunsi, Ngọc Nguyễn and von Rosen there is a sense of tension, an almost push-pull movement, in the way their work goes against preconceived notion within their genres or the way in which they approach their subject-matter. Their work can also be said to vibrate in an “in-between”-state, never caught in a static place, but rather in a state of flow or development. Writing about his work Ocean Smile, Dhunsi points to the “space between permanence and dissolution” in which it exists – both in the way it addresses questions about the layered and performed aspects of identity, but also in its materiality. Textiles are a recurring material in his practice, and by allowing the material its movement and breath, his works seek to resist the rigid authority of the photographic frame.
Sally von Rosen’s hybrid creatures – often found balancing on their sharp-clawed feet, staggering forward but appearing somehow lost in their sense of direction - evoke contrasting feelings of tenderness, brutality, longing and violence. Interconnectedness, and the longing for it, is a recurring theme. Von Rosen is concerned with the power that objects can exert on people and their social interactions, and by considering the material as a vessel capable of transferring emotion, it upends the idea of material as purely static and dissolves the subject-object distinction between the sculpture and its viewer. A push-pull movement is present in her work: both in the physically taxing process of bringing the sculptures to life, but also in the sculpture’s relation to one another. Often originating as one piece, von Rosen saws the bodies apart and thus creating two pieces stuck in an everlasting search for the missing half.
This push-pull tension can also manifest in the artist’s subject-matter. Dhunsi’s practice resists the static nature of photography, and his works are situated in the intersection of photography, textiles and installation. He also takes interest in photography’s role in shaping and controlling vision. This interest in how images shape vison and how it can resist preconceived notions and stereotypes is also present in Ngọc Nguyễn’s practice, which deconstructs and examines an iconography derived from the South-East Asian cultural sphere, fused with visual tendencies and memes from the internet. Both artists are anchored in dual cultures – Dhunsi with an Indian-Norwegian background, and Ngọc Nguyễn being a first-generation Danish individual of the Vietnamese diaspora - which is often reflected in their work.
Utilizing the semiotics of the brightly lit and highly stylized commercial photography, Ngọc Nguyễn explores dichotomies and how culturally charged objects can be interpreted. In this exhibition a block of tofu, which is associated with both joy and prosperity, is fused with a kitschy, Y2K, internet aesthetics in a surrealistic still life. In his Plain Dealing, a hand is seen gently clutching a model-hand, both bound together by a so called “Chinese finger trap” – a toy which functions so that the more both parts try to pull away from each other, the stronger the hold of the finger trap gets. This exploration of tension in and between objects, is also present in the adjacently installed work Final Squeeze. The red pomelo, a fruit he often ate during his upbringing, is here tied up in a rubber band with its juices flowing out as the fruit is about to burst. As Ngọc Nguyễn describes his interpretation of the exhibition title, he sees it as an invitation to give way to impulses, thus letting go and letting intuition take hold instead.
Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff (b. 1967, lives and works in Gothenburg) is one of the most influential photographic artists in Sweden. She is well-known for her carefully arranged images with a documentary visual expression, but her most recent body of work is based on already existing photos. Recurring themes are patriarchal structures, criminology, global capitalism, the subconscious and her deep interest in the photographic image. Von Hausswolff represented Sweden in the Venice Biennale of 1999 and her work has since been subject to three major retrospectives: at Magasin III in 2009, at Hasselblad Foundation in 2016 and at Moderna Museet in 2021-2022. Her work is represented in the collections of Fotomuseum Winterthur, KIASMA Helsinki, SF MOMA San Francisco, MCA Chicago, Moderna Museet Stockholm and The Solomon R Guggenheim Collection, to name a few.
Dev Dhunsi (b. 1996, lives and works in Oslo) received his MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2024. Dhunsi recently presented the solo exhibition Encircling Stories at the Centre for Photography in Stockholm, which travelled from MELK in Oslo. In 2024, his work was also shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, during Organ Vida 13th Festival and Futures Photography. In his works, Dhunsi combines textile and photographic techniques. Through his work, he aims to create space for overlooked or silenced stories, illustrating how historical, cultural and political forces shape our lives and experiences. In 2026, Dhunsi will present a solo exhibition at Nitja Senter for Samtidskunst in Lillestrøm, Norway. Parallel to the exhibition, a publication is to be released at SPBH-Editions / Mack Books, accompanied by an exhibition at SPBH-Space in Milano.
Minh Ngọc Nguyễn (b. 1992, lives and works in Copenhagen) graduated in 2018 from HDK-Valand with an MFA in Photography with Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff as professor. In his work, he fuses and remixes Asian stereotypes with popular culture images. The studio aesthetic of commercial photography is used as a way to amplify and highlight the fetishizations and tendencies he wants to both highlight and question. Ngọc Nguyễn’s works are represented in the collections of KIASMA, among others.
Sally von Rosen's (b. 1994, lives and works between Berlin and Gothenburg) sculpture and performance work has drawn much attention in recent years and has been shown frequently in both solo and institutional group exhibitions in Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Austria, and Sweden, as well as being presented at The Armory Show in New York. Her work aims to convey an intuitive understanding and she is interested in how emotional impressions can be transmitted through objects, in a struggle between what can be experienced as simultaneously attractive and repulsive.
