Färgfabriken opens it's spring group exhibition Taking Root

On April 18, Färgfabriken opens its spring exhibition Taking Root – a comprehensive group exhibition in which twelve contemporary artists explore what it means to take root, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. Through installations, sculpture, textiles, painting, and video works, the exhibition examines how people, plants, ideas, and cultures take root in soil, in language, in memory, and in new territories.

Taking Root also highlights practices of resistance and the human drive to create context, security, and community. The exhibition brings together narratives about our relationship to place and belonging: from migrants’ search for new homes to ecological perspectives on seeds, soils, and endangered tree species. At the same time, attention is directed toward the structures and conditions required for something – or someone – to truly take root.

The exhibition opens with the series POST (Simone Weil) by Thomas Hirschhorn. Executed as assemblages on brown cardboard, the works form a visual dialogue between Hirschhorn and Simone Weil, readable both as philosophical reflection and as a poetic tribute to art.

At the center of the exhibition is Leone Contini’s work The Sprouting House (working title) (2026), a site-specific installation shaped through soil, water, and stories collected from various locations in and around Stockholm. A patchwork of soils, where each fragment carries its own seeds, memories, and potentials. The work originates from a water-filled pit in Vinterviken – dug out with the help of local forces in the 1970s.

In Jumana Manna’s film Wild Relatives (2019), we follow, among other things, selected seeds on their journeys across the world. The film begins at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where seeds from around the globe are stored deep inside a mountain chamber cooled by the surrounding permafrost as a form of global insurance against future crises. When a Syrian seed archive in Aleppo is destroyed during the war, researchers and agronomists must retrieve their seeds from the vault and replant them in Lebanon – a process that both inspires hope and reveals vulnerability. Through poetic imagery, slow movements, and everyday encounters, Manna portrays how agriculture, geopolitical conflict, and climate change are deeply intertwined. “A seed is like love; planting hearts will put out the fires of war.”

At the far end of the exhibition space, Hanna Ljungh presents her new video work Almarna (2026), an approximately 20-minute film and sound piece centered around a live choral composition by Lo Kristensson. In the middle of the night, on May 11–12, 2024, the work was performed in Kungsträdgården. The film recalls the decisive moments of the Elm Conflict of 1971, when demonstrators climbed the trees and the police were forced to retreat. This historical moment is mirrored against today’s ecological crisis. In the choral piece, the singers breathe in and out, evoking the fragile exchange between humans and trees: oxygen for carbon dioxide, life for life.

In connection with the exhibition, Färgfabriken will host several events: an opening and inauguration during Stockholm Culture Night, an artist talk with Filippa Arrias, and performative workshops with Hiroko Tsuchimoto.

The exhibition is curated by Anna-Karin Wulgué.

The Latin origin of the word ‘root’ comes from the term radix, radical. Being rooted also signifies to stand for something, to be dedicated. Simone Weil’s book The Need for Roots (1949), the Swedish version of which inspired the original name of this exhibition Att slå rot, presents roots as a human need, deeper than rights or ownership. She emphasises that humans need to feel rooted in a community, a culture and a place in order to create a meaningful life. Uprootedness, on the other hand, denotes a contrasting condition involving loss of identity, loss of meaning and connection – alienation. But what happens when roots are not perceived in terms of a location? When home is a movement, a transition, an opacity? For philosopher Édouard Glissant, opacity is a necessary reminder that every human, every culture bears a depth that cannot be captured. Putting down roots is about living with the incomprehensible, allowing relationships to develop as you interact with the unknown. Glissant’s philosophy is that home is rarely a physical location but rather a process of interwoven relationships, memories, language and more; all of it in constant motion, with boundaries transforming into passageways.

These lines of thought serve here as possible entry points to the narrative framework of the exhibition, within which the artists’ works feature as independent stories while collectively forming a vibrant whole.

Participating artists

Filippa Arrias

Filippa Arrias (born 1971) uses painting and collage as her principal artistic media, through which she explores our perceptions of time and memory. Her focus in recent years has been an artistic research project that took her to Suriname to explore her own family history. Arrias blends documented stories, including archival photographs, with her own contemporary images and narratives. Her large paintings become narratives to step into, incorporating layers of materiality, time and memory processes.

Filippa Arrias was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and now lives and works in Stockholm.

Fikret Atay

Video artist Fikret Atay (born 1976) examines the tensions that arise from antagonism between West and East. He exploits the boundary between documentary and fiction to highlight how cultural situations and expression, often with a local context, can have political dimensions of oppression and vulnerability from a global perspective. Recently, Atay has specifically focused on how inner landscapes and our senses are in constant flux. His new work Echoes of time depicts the route to the West, controlled by smugglers.

Fikret Atay was born in Batman, a Turkish city on the border with Iraq. He is of Kurdish descent and currently lives and works in Örebro, Sweden.

Leone Contini

Leone Contini (born 1976) works with a variety of media, including performance lectures, installations, text, drawings and collective interventions in public spaces. Contini’s research and art inhabit the intersection between anthropology, aesthetics and politics. Within these fields, he focuses on intercultural conflicts, power dynamics, migration and diasporas – how these phenomena affect the anthropological context and the botanical landscapes of the locations in which he conducts his fieldwork. By collecting and experimenting with seeds, soil and stories, Contini explores migration, coexistence and histories of different species.

Leone Contini’s participation is supported by the Italian Culture Institute in Stockholm.

Leone Contini was born in Florence, Italy, and currently lives and works in Tuscany.

Gerd Göran

Gerd Göran (born 1919) has amassed a rich, colourful and multifaceted body of work over her 90 years as an artist. She worked primarily as a painter and textile artist, drawing inspiration from nature and life, often from where she herself had put down roots: the rural location of Sångshyttan, just outside Hällefors, where she lived for almost her entire life. Her work is characterised by a lifelong and joyful creativity, marked by a tenacious sense of curiosity and a love of the magic to be found in everyday life and art itself. Another key aspect of Göran’s art is her interest in climate politics.

Gerd Göran was born in Akre, Sweden, and currently lives in Skåre.

Thomas Hirschhorn

Thomas Hirschhorn (born 1957) is best known for his works in public spaces and for the various simple materials he uses: cardboard, tape, paper, magazine clippings and aluminium foil. A recurrent feature of his work is questioning the autonomy of a work of art, as well as asserting the power of art to move people and create change, not least in relation to Andre. Hirschhorn feels that art allows us to truly meet one another: one to one, as equals. With that in mind, many of his works are dedicated to philosophers, authors and artists he himself loves. One such author is Simone Weil, and Hirschhorn’s series Why I love Simone Weil has been an ongoing artistic dialogue since 2019.

Thomas Hirschhorn was born in Bern, Switzerland, and now lives and works in Paris, France.

Moa Israelsson

Moa Israelsson (born 1982) is a sculptor, working with a variety of techniques and materials. Meticulously hand-stitched and painted sculptures are the focus of her art, works that bear witness to the passage of time, objects in decay and the human condition. Israelsson often works with silk, paper and leather – one sheer and delicate, the other durable and hard-wearing. Her soft, vulnerable and unadorned sculptures evoke feelings of tenderness, the curious yet familiar.

Moa Israelsson was born in Ljungby, Sweden, and now lives and works in Åkers Styckebruk.

Hanna Ljungh

Artist Hanna Ljungh (born 1974) primarily works with film, photography, sculpture and installations. Her artistic practice is devoted to themes concerning land, soil, stone and mountains. Ljungh’s work reflects on and questions the fine line between what we call human and non-human forms of existence and the complex relationships between them. Her work Almarna takes us into Kungsträdgården over the course of one night to witness the battle for the trees, which remain standing to this day, in the form of a performance that takes place during the minutes crucial to the fate of these elm trees back in 1971.

Hanna Ljungh was born in Washington DC, USA, and currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

Daryna Mamaisur

Daryna Mamaisur (born 1991) combines art research, filmmaking and photography in her practice. The central focus of her art is transformation of landscapes and public spaces in relation to visual culture, memory and political ecology. Mamaisur often combines different media and approaches that go beyond traditional documentary films, including hybrid formats, performative elements and archive material. She is interested in poetic and author-driven film that is simultaneously rooted in everyday life; highlighting complex histories and emotions through everyday experiences. Her recent work has tackled themes of migration, exile and home, as well as the fragility and inadequacy of language in the context of the realities of war.

Daryna Mamaisur was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and currently lives and works in Kyiv and Brussels, Belgium.

Jumana Manna

With the body, land and materiality as her focus, Jumana Manna (born 1987) explores how power is articulated in relation to colonial structures and the histories of specific locations. She scrutinises the tension between modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation, and the unpredictability and potential of destruction – as part of life and renewal. These paradoxes in conservation practices are a frequent focus of Manna’s work, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. In recent years, Manna has garnered international acclaim for her films, with documentary and fictional elements depicting complex geopolitical conditions and migration: of humans, land, climate and seeds.

Jumana Manna was born in New Jersey, USA, and now lives in Berlin, Germany, but also works in Jerusalem, Palestine.

(p)Art of the Biomass / Janna Holmstedt & Malin Lobell med vänner

(p)Art of the Biomass is an art platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration and exploration, initiated by artists Janna Holmstedt (born 1972) and Malin Lobell (born1965). They offer exploratory labs, ecosocial sculptures and site exploration, in which art, ecology, microbiology, cultivation and speculative thinking can all interact. The installation De underjordiskas karneval, episod 2 is dedicated to the subterranean world: teeming with life that we humans are dependent on yet rarely see or spare a thought for.

Janna Holmstedt was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and currently lives and works in Stockholm. Malin Lobell was born in Linköping, Sweden, and currently lives and works in Stockholm and Kåseberga.

Hiroko Tsuchimoto

Hiroko Tsuchimoto (born 1984) is a visual and performance artist, who employs participatory practices on stage and in public spaces. Her projects often revolve around Western dichotomies and structures. Her practice incorporates dialogue, drawing, walking and gardening, developing this together with human and more-than-human partners. Tsuchimoto’s recent focus has been examining and highlighting colonial notions and imperialist might through the history of gardens. She is also interested in preservation and collection via our senses and memories – how, for example, a plant can take root in a person.

Hiroko Tsuchimoto was born in Sapporo, Japan, and now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

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