Migration: Traces in an Art Collection

Artists: Jānis Aižēns, Meriç Algün, Muhammad Ali, Sahar al-Khateeb, Albin Amelin, Pia Arke, Kārlis Baltgailis, Maja Berezowska, Carlos Capelán, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Eduards D Dzenis, Ewa Einhorn & Jeuno JE Kim, Sven Xet Erixson, Öyvind Fahlström, Jörgen Fogelquist, Luca Frei, Leon Golub, Jāzeps Grosvalds, Isaac Grünewald, KW Gullers, Maxime Hourani, Marija Induse-Muceniece, Charlotte Johannesson, Björn Jonson, Eduards Kalniņš, Käthe Kollwitz, Jakob Kulle, Kusmievkowa, Runo Lagomarsino, Lotte Laserstein, Lars Laumann, Franco Leidi, Per-Oskar Leu, Ludolf Liberts, Milda Liepiņa, Janis Karlovic, Milda Liepinš, Lage Lindell, Sven Ljungberg, Egon Møller-Nielsen, Sirous Namazi, Endre Nemes, Gerhard Nordström, Jānis Plēpis, Vilhelms Purvītis, Minna Rainio & Mark Roberts, Jānis Rozentāls, Ninnan Santesson, Vassil Simittchiev, Uga Skulme, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, Niklāvs Strunke, SUPERFLEX, Olle Svanlund, Jānis Ferdinands Tīdemanis, Valdemārs Tone, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, Birgitta Trotzig, Ulf Trotzig, Tage Törning, Konrads Ubāns, Sigismunds Vidbergs, Peter Weiss, Adja Yunkers, Jacques Zadig, Richard Zariņš, Birgit Åkesson, Anders Österlin.

How have artists related to exile and migration over the past 150 years? Searching for traces in the collection of Malmö Konstmuseum, this exhibition engages a range of artistic expressions of the migrant experience, while examining the museum itself as a site of knowledge production. The exhibition gathers around a hundred artworks, spanning more than a century of migration history.

Migration: Traces in an Art Collection began with an extraordinary turn of events at the museum in the spring of 1945. At the close of the Second World War, refugees from the Nazi concentration camps arrived in “White Buses” operated by the Swedish Red Cross. With public facilities quickly reaching capacity, director Ernst Fischer decided overnight to transform the museum into a refugee shelter, providing hundreds of beds. The event is memorialised in a monumental painting from the same year by the artist Sven Xet Erixson. But it is also recorded in the many drawings left behind by those who found accommodation in the museum, which have remained in the collection ever since. Among them are small works on paper that depict life in the concentration camps, or portraits of other prisoners.

Another group of works illustrates the relationship between Sweden and the Baltic region during the buildup to the Second World War and the period immediately following. In 1939, Malmö Museum received a private donation slated for the establishment of a Latvian collection at the museum, leading to the purchase of forty-five artworks in solidarity with the young nation. Seven months later, the Soviet Army occupied Latvia, and many of the country’s artists fled to Sweden. In 1947, when the museum acquired additional works for the Latvian collection, many of them were associated with these émigré artists. These unique paintings, conveying experiences of war, migration, exile and everyday life, are now on view for the first time in over fifty years.

A third group of works sheds light on the increasing political consciousness and global engagement that was burgeoning in much of the art world during the 1960s and ’70s. This group includes works by artists who have firsthand experience of migration but do not explicitly depict it in their works. It also presents a number of contemporary works that comment on the perception of migration and displacement in a globalised world – one of the most burning issues of our time.

Exhibition design by artist Luca Frei, inspired by the painting Rythme couleur by Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1952), also on view at Malmö Konstmuseum.

Curators: Maria Lind and Cecilia Widenheim

The exhibition is a collaboration with Tensta Konsthall