Vivian Suter: I Am Godzilla / Kiki Smith: Woven Worlds

Upcoming
Lee Mingwei
Best Regards, Lee Mingwei
September 26, 2025–January 11, 2026

Edi Hila
November 8, 2025–April 12, 2026

What happens when you open the door and invite nature and fairytale wolves into your studio and your artworks? During summer and autumn 2025, Moderna Museet Malmö exhibits artists that have forged their own paths inspired by fables and sagas, or, by a practice that involves exposing the work to the elements and reflecting the creative process in the studio.

Vivian Suter’s exhibition I Am Godzilla, curated by Andreas Nilsson, takes over the impressive Turbine Hall in a non-hierarchical way as an overflowing and fertile garden. The paintings are covering the ten metres high walls; they are suspended from the ceiling; and strewn on the floor. It is all characterised by a physical and spontaneous process, and in the centre of the exhibition a wooden bridge allows visitors to shift the perspective of the body and the gaze. Suter has been living and working in Panajachel, Guatemala, for over 40 years, where her close surroundings become active collaborators. In her paintings, traces of leaves, sticks and rainwater merge with the semi-abstract motifs in tones ranging from muted to bright. ”An exhibition of Vivian Suter’s paintings is an extension of the place where she lives and works—an abstracted reflection of her surroundings”, says the exhibition’s curator Andreas Nilsson. There are no boundaries of the canvases. Neither is it clear whether a painting should be displayed vertically or horizontally—the artists lets the space and context determine. With few exceptions, Suter’s works are untitled and undated, which emphasises the feeling of continually ongoing transformation.

Two events in recent years have been especially important for Suter’s artistic development—hurricanes Stan (2005) and Agatha (2010), which caused massive flooding and disaster. Suter’s house and studio were affected, and her paintings were covered in mud and water. After some deliberation she decided to keep them and retain the effects of nature on them. These traces were incorporated and became a part of the work. “I started to like how nature painted on them”, as Vivian Suter puts it. She often lets her canvases dry outside—on the veranda, lying in the garden or hung between the trees—where they are exposed to the elements. In this way, nature becomes part of the work, both as motif and material. Oil and acrylic paint are mixed with earth, botanical matter and jungle-based microorganisms, creating landscape paintings in both the literal and conceptual sense of the term.

During the final weekend of I Am Godzilla performances by artist Nina Beier will take place in the setting of Vivian Suter’s exhibition.

Vivian Suter was born in Buenos Aires in 1949. Since early 1980s, she has been living and working in Panajachel, Guatemala, near Lake Atitlán. She has previously exhibited at institutions such as Vienna Secession, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, as well as documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

In her exhibition Woven Worlds, Kiki Smith focuses our gaze on nature. Through intimate studies and fabulous fantasies, her weavings are populated by wolves, delicate butterflies, and shadowy bats. In the large-scale tapestries, measuring almost 300 x 200 cm, Smith adds silver thread to create a shimmering world of details. The layered collages that the tapestries are based on are almost as large and are shown side by side while her sculptures vary in material—from bronze with inlaid gemstones to porcelain with graphite.

Smith has returned time and again throughout her career to the theme of the body and its internal organs. In 1991 Smith made a prequel to being born with her work Sperm Piece, a sparkling shoal made up of more than 700 sperm-like glass pieces spread out on the floor, that is part of the Moderna Museet collection. The work was acquired to the collection in 1992, during a time ravaged by the HIV virus, and when many contracted AIDS and died a premature death. Although effective HIV treatment is available today, the disease continues to claim lives in many parts of the world. Certain works, and artists, are strongly connected to this time in history such as Félix González-Torres and Derek Jarman. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the danger was real, and the body became a threat.

In Woven Worlds the artist turns her gaze outward—where the relationship between human, animal, and nature stands at the centre as a cosmic totality.

“Her animals are realistic but not descriptive figures in a fauna; they derive from images from fairy tales and myths. In the exhibition, we get to follow her process through materials that leads up to the tapestries”, states Elisabeth Millqvist, Director of Moderna Museet Malmö. Smith is constantly exploring new techniques. The tapestries in the exhibition are created with computerised jacquard looms that make possible a complex colour palette through dense warp threads. Smith compares machine weaving to printmaking, a way to duplicate motifs and create variations in editions.

The exhibition is part of the museum’s ongoing investigation of artists who use varying entry points as they engage in questions of environment, nature, and transition. Woven Worlds has been developed in close collaboration with the artist and on the initiative of Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Germany and curator Jutta Mattern. It was recently shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro.

Kiki Smith was born in 1954 and lives and works in New York. Since the 1980s she is known for her multidisciplinary work exploring the topics of embodiment and the natural world. Her work has been featured in over 25 solo museum exhibition and in five editions of the Venice Biennale.

Following to the exhibitions of Smith and Suter, Moderna Museet Malmö presents Best regards, Lee Mingwei, Lee Mingwei (b. Taiwan) and an exhibition with Edi Hila (b. Albania) during autumn 2025.

Moderna Museet Malmö is part of the state-owned Moderna Museet and is funded by the City of Malmö, Region Skåne, and the Swedish government.