A wall of trees grows just a few meters from our apartment building. Deer wander through the clearing, a squirrel scurries in when the door is open, and recently an ant colony carved a trail across our living room. Apparently, a crack in a window frame or a door slightly ajar is enough for animals to stake their claim to our home as part of their territory.
Kiki Smith’s exhibition at Moderna Museet in Malmö presents a similar vision of human and natural world intersecting. Here, animals are not viewed from a distance, but constantly make their presence known, on equal footing with humans. Unfortunately, the American artist – who rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with work addressing women’s politics, the AIDS epidemic, grief, and loss – has been consigned to a series of small rooms on the museum’s upper floor. The first floor hosts Vivian Suter, the Argentinian-born artist who had her breakthrough at Documenta 14 in 2017. In the vast turbine hall of the former electricity plant, her paintings hang by the hundreds all the way up to the ceiling.
After Suter’s spectacular takeover, Smith’s show feels quiet, but no less powerful. Upon entering the space, the etching Wolf Girl (1999) establishes wolves as a prominent feature of her work. Further in are Polaroids of a naked woman, presumably the artist herself, with small paper wings attached to the photographs turning her into a bat or a butterfly. Are such werewolf-like transformations, rather than the motifs as such, Smith’s true subject? Her methods are collage and printing – techniques based on contact, touch, and repetition rather than traditional representation.
The exhibition comprises some fifty works, mostly from the 2000s. It’s rich in materials and textures, juxtaposing cast bronzes with delicate works on paper. The centrepieces are Smith’s three-meter-high tapestries, based on equally large collages which are also on display. Both are full of echoes and repetitions, subtle shifts and transformations. The weaves shimmer with thousands of threads – hypnotic and mutable surfaces that, combined with the intricate compositions, seem to mimic the chaotic forces of nature.
While there, I found myself pacing back and forth in front of the tapestries, which lack stable focal points from which to survey the image as a whole. Several depict naked women either floating towards the stars or sitting on a branch in the forest. In the blood-chilling Underground (2012) a nude man lies buried underground. Parliament (2017) depicts owls, stars, and insects against a light background, which I interpret as a negative image of the night sky. Predator and prey together, in stillness, for a moment.
To Smith, nature is not innocent but beautiful and menacing – a murderous world beyond morality. It reminds me of how the natural world is described as a primal force by authors like Kerstin Ekman or Olga Tokarczuk. Or why not the Brothers Grimm? Smith’s images share the same force and universal scope of world literature, and deserve similar recognition.
Of course, some of her tapestries are more compelling than others. Guide (2012) depicts a pair of eagles against a light sky, yet the regal birds come across as oddly cartoonish. The naked woman floating to the stars in Sky (2011) looks like she is made of rubber, while the primal mother of Earth (2011) feels rather static and unimaginative.
Yet, as I moved in close to Earth, I was drawn into a bizarre universe where eyes and leaves were floating in a dissolved state. In the next room, the gazing eyes resurfaced as tiny gems embedded in three writhing sculptures displayed in a vitrine. The bronzes awakened something in me that I couldn’t quite articulate. I thought about art historian Aby Warburg’s (1866–1929) notion that certain forms carry an emotional charge through time and reappear in different contexts as recurring image-memories. The experience sharpened my senses and put me into an eerie state of unease.
My gaze gravitated toward a swarm of shimmering butterflies high up on the wall. I then rushed back to look at Smith’s smallish, colourless drawing of a hare splattered with glitter. It appeared frazzled and disoriented in a way that seems to reflect my own mental state. A beast on its way home through darkness, bewildered yet determined.
Collage is often described as an emblematic invention of twentieth-century visual art. Yet, Smith’s use of the technique as an entry point to the older tapestry tradition ties it to a time when there was a stronger link between image and belief – when images naturally seemed to function as bridges between poles of existence. At the same time, collage, by its very nature, brings disparate elements together, hurling Smith’s work straight into the question of the image as its own form of faith, or speculation about alternate realities.
Returning to Wolf Girl, I pondered how we often treat linguistic abstractions as more real than the hybrid forms we actually encounter – how language makes us see things that aren’t there, and un-see things that are. Images, by contrast, can unravel the hold of language, showing us that what is common to concepts like nature or culture might be just as significant as what keeps them apart through intellectual and cultural barriers.
Indeed, isn’t this precisely how images functioned in medieval manuscripts or church paintings – by making that which is evicted by language visible, tangible, real? Smith works in a similar way by merging knowledge and imagination in the shadow realm of her pictures. Hers is not an art of clean resolutions or moral clarity, but of ambiguity and unsettled boundaries. The glittered hare, the bat-winged woman, the underground corpse: they all inhabit a world where the symbolic and the physical bleed into one another, challenging us to reconsider what is natural, what is human, and what is seen.
Today, we might ask what purpose art museums serve at a time when culture is in upheaval and the climate is in crisis. Moderna Museet Malmö presents a convincing answer. By juxtaposing Smith and Suter, it stages a conversation about perception, coexistence, and the forms of storytelling that we need in an age of rupture. Both artists, in their own registers, seem to propose a kind of sacred attention. They remind us that in order to repair our relationship with the living world, we may first need to see it differently – and perhaps, as Smith suggests, become a little wild ourselves.
