Frieze New Writers Pick the Best Shows in the Nordics

This Critic’s Guide has been written by the seven participants who took part in this year’s Frieze New Writers programme in Bergen, Norway – a free-to-attend intensive three-day course for aspiring art writers in the Nordic region led by the frieze editorial team. This initiative is part of frieze’s wider commitment to amplifying diverse voices within the art world and was produced in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

‘MIN – From the Root Grows the Sky’ | Botkyrka Konsthall, Sweden | 5 April – 13 September 

For the group show ‘MIN – From the Root Grows the Sky’, Botkyrka Konsthall invited three local artists to respond to a filmed conversation between Swedish poets Valentina Cuevas, Ricard Estay and Nora Khalil, centred on notions of place and belonging in Stockholm’s suburbs. Saba Tadele’s film-poem A Language of Light (2025) reflects on diasporic alienation and racism through glimpses of sunlight on water, a barbershop in neighbouring Skärholmen and an Ethiopian Orthodox gathering. Amara Por Dios’s installation När vi blommar (When We Bloom, 2025) fills the gallery walls with lysergic flower-eyes, creating a playful dialogue between municipal and corporate appropriations of street art. With the triptych Oblivion 1976 (2015–23), Leon Mendoza paints a cloudy blur between sky and sea, tracing the absence left by the thousands who ‘disappeared’ in death flights during Argentina’s former military dictatorship. Loss also registers in Mendoza’s Riktningar 1, 2 och 3 (Directions 1, 2 and 3, 2024–25), an installation that – containing meteorite and metal fragments, water from a nearby lake, and ceramic shards dappled like petrified birch – becomes a private form of forensics. Building on long-term curatorial cultivation, ‘MIN’ presents the transnational in the hyper-local, mediating between home-grown cultural production and the contemporary art system. – Andria Nyberg Forshage

Monira Al Qadiri | Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland | 21 March – 7 September 

While the reflective surfaces and symmetrical shapes of Monira Al Qadiri’s large-scale floating sculptures invite childlike wonder, her solo exhibition at Kiasma, ‘Deep Fate’, is haunted by the horrors of crude oil extraction. Beneath a skylight, Benzene Float (Tetrakis) (2024) shimmers in the white Nordic sun, its metallic teal and purple hues melting into one other like petrol on the surface of a puddle. Elsewhere, the majestic kinetic machinery of Future Past 3 (2023) and Alien Technology (Diamond) (2023) fills the space with a flat purr as the works rotate like drills. Natural pearls, carved into similar drill-like shapes, languish in lifeless aquariums in opposite corners of the room (Wonder, 2016–18). Sleek, sterile objects dominate the gallery. In Deep Float (2017), two shiny black epoxy arms reach out from a white tub filled with what looks like unctuous oil. Behind the Sun (2013), a video displayed on a curved 1990s television screen, sits in the centre of the room. In the footage, Kuwaiti oil fields burn while a low voice recites elegiac poetry in Arabic. – Carmen Baltzar

Marina Xenofontos | Mint, Stockholm, Sweden | 4 April – 15 June

Throughout the basement rooms of Mint, Stockholm, Marina Xenofontos plays with darkness and light. Opening with a maquette featuring a monitor displaying a raging fire (15th of July, 2025) and the projection of a burning toy building (Overnight Coup Plan, 2025), the Athens-based artist’s first solo exhibition in Sweden grows visibly dimmer the further you progress into the basement. In Evacuation Plan (2023), photographs the artist took of herself two decades ago are placed on MDF boards with flashing LED dots. One image shows her relaxing, then sucking in her stomach, recalling an adolescent fixation on the body. The artist’s new short film, Overnight Coup Plan, follows a group of girls participating in a coming-of-age tradition for Cypriot teenagers: a party trip to Ayia Napa. The narrative is loose – a concoction of clips accompanied by white noise and little to no dialogue. Shaky, low-resolution scenes display kissing, post-party feasting, fits of laughter. The film evokes Xenofontos’s own teenage years in the early 2000s, before everyone had a professional camera in their pocket, although more contemporary moments – a TikTok reference or a glimpse of an album cover from 2019 – pull us back to the present. A scene of someone half-passed out inhaling laughing gas alternates with an image of a coiling snake. Here, intoxication is portrayed as a thrill-filled escape for curious minds – a rite of passage marking the end of childhood innocence. – Josephine Frans

Madeleine Andersson | Index, Stockholm, Sweden | 3 April – 24 August 

At Index, Madeleine Andersson’s latest solo show, ‘SHOCK VALUE’, encourages us to celebrate stupidity, by seeing it not as diametrically opposed to intelligence but as its ‘flickering’ source. This dense exhibition is comprised of a series of sculptures and videos exploring historic and contemporary ways of conceptualizing the human brain. The speculative documentary Degenerative Knowledge Production (2024) combines found online footage with a slightly goofy-sounding voice-over to describe the interplay between intelligence, stupidity and electricity throughout the history of Western science. With gory scenes of people ingesting brain tissue, it’s a nauseating watch. This queasiness is compounded after discovering that the installation 10K Virgin Brains (2024) – stacks of white plastic buckets and trailing human hair lining the exhibition’s walls – is a replica of the world’s largest collection of preserved human brains, housed at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. Medical ethics are also probed in Knock, Knock (I-II) (2024), two wooden reinterpretations of the mortsafe, a cage historically used to prevent grave digging and the theft of corpses for scientific purposes. I leave the show feeling physically sick and ingeniously aware of an obvious yet easily forgotten truth: there is no thinking without feeling. – Elmer Blåvarg

Kinga Bartis | Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense, Denmark | 5 April – 4 January 2026

Romanian artist Kinga Bartis’s quietly captivating solo exhibition, ‘Closelings’, at Kunstmuseum Brandts, features several large-scale canvases alongside a selection of miniature paintings. The works – which depict entanglements of bodies, flora and fauna – exude an ethereal quality. Four vast canvases, for instance, feature tendrillar ribs wrapped in an embrace (Self undoing yet still moving, 2025; Meaning’s end, 2024; Why to fence with the wind, 2024; Much of belief comes from longing, 2024). The chalky colours of Bartis’s paintings don’t remain exclusively on the canvases themselves, however, with the artist allowing some strokes of pigment to bleed onto the surrounding gallery walls – as in Self undoing yet still moving (2025). There is something disorienting about the varied scales of Bartis’s work, which pull us in then spit us out again, our eyes forced to oscillate between micro and macro. ‘Closelings’ treats painting less as a window and more as a porous surface – something that doesn’t just represent the world, but gently alters how we move through it. – Olivia Turner Saul

Anna Guðjónsdóttir | Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland | 12 April – 24 May 

Reality seems to skew within Anna Guðjónsdóttir’s solo exhibition, ‘Hollow Sky Hidden Ocean’, at artist-run space Kling & Bang. Here, the waves ordinarily visible through the windows of the gallery, located on Reykjavik harbour, are masked by strokes of light blue paint across the panes (Hidden, 2025). Meanwhile, the ticking of a grandfather clock (Interaction, 2025) reminds us that – even in this doctored environment – time carries on. Enveloping the viewer in this eerily serene chamber, Guðjónsdóttir explores the ways in which meaning is constructed. A painting of a vitrine of water (Anthem to a Mother, 2025), the canvas lining the wall, gives the illusion of a large-scale, three-dimensional display case in the centre of the space. It evokes a theatre set, leading us to question our position as observers – not always able to trust our perception of our surroundings. In an alcove at the end of the room, a selection of Guðjónsdóttir’s sketches hangs on the walls and is displayed across a long table. These drawings are ambiguous, presenting images which are hard to identify with any certainty: are they eyeballs or wombs, roots or veins, ropes or strands of DNA? While Guðjónsdóttir’s unique perspective is on full display here, ‘Hollow Sky Hidden Ocean’ reminds us that we are all bound by the shared experience of being human. – Teija Smith

Hannah Ryggen Triennale | Nordenfjeldske Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, Norway | 4 April – 14 September 

The main exhibition of the 4th Hannah Ryggen Triennale, ‘Mater’, presents an array of crimson-hued works – including sculpture, installation and textile – by 14 contemporary artists, alongside a small number of pieces by unidentified creators. The show responds to the titular word – Latin for ‘mother’ and the etymological root of ‘material’ – with depictions of aching hearts and hands reaching, holding and resisting, recalling the physical and emotional labour tied to motherhood and feminist resistance. Anchoring this year’s theme is Ryggen’s tapestry Mother’s Heart (1947), a deeply personal work made in response to her daughter’s illness. A large red heart is held, then shattered into pieces, tracing maternal love as it shifts from joy to grief.  It enters quiet dialogue with works by the late Norwegian artist Elisabeth Haarr, known for her radical approach to textile. In Haarr’s Mor (Mother, 1982), two hands float in turquoise threads on a deconstructed loom, half-lost in a cluster of clothespins clinging to cords, as if blurred by interruptive labour – a nod to the domestic strain of care. Haarr’s work reflects a wider feminist shift in the 1970s, when ideas of motherhood and womanhood were redefined. By introducing materials from daily life, like plastic strips and synthetic yarn, she expanded the language of weaving. Both Haarr and Ryggen invest manual creative methods with symbolism; both use softness to carry weight. – Adele Seip

^{Main image: Madeleine Andersson, Degenerative Knowledge Production, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Index, Stockholm; photograph: Aron Skoog}