John Skoog: REDOUBT / Edi Hila: Fractured Horizons

When the World Trembles
This spring, Moderna Museet Malmö presents two notable exhibitions that respond to a pervasive sense of insecurity and instability with poetic openness and a reflective stillness approaching meditative restraint. Edi Hila’s Fractured Horizons unfolds across the museum’s upper galleries, bringing together five decades of artistic practice. On the lower level, in the museum’s monumental Turbine Hall, John Skoog presents REDOUBT. Shaped by a profound fear of war, this sculptural and filmic exhibition emerges as a monument to care.

John Skoog: VÄRN/REDOUBT
February 14–May 17, 2026
In collaboration with Laslo Chenchanna, Julian Ernst, Gabriel Karlsson, Erlend Rødsten, Søren Schwarzberg, and Ernst Skoog.
Curator: Joa Ljungberg

Sensing the approaching war, Karl-Göran Persson (1894–1975) transformed his home into a protective redoubt—for himself, for the village, and for the king. The work began in the 1930s and gained momentum in 1943, when the civil defence pamphlet If War Comes was distributed to households across Sweden. Construction continued through the Cold War until Persson’s death in 1975. His fear of war, as well as his stubborn care, was sustained by a rationality that also harboured something more fragile, more unruly. To many, his actions seemed exaggerated, even irrational. But what, then, constitutes a measured response to the threat of war? And what is war, if not the collapse of humanity—and of reason?

Persson collected scrap metal from nearby farms—discarded tools and objects from an increasingly mechanised agriculture. He dragged the material home by bicycle and cast it into the concrete as reinforcement. Gradually, the house was encased in a grey-white shell where obsolete implements, bicycle parts, and milk churns still glimmer like fossils from an earlier society.

In REDOUBT, we encounter Persson’s structure as a monumental sculpture. Eleven metres long and five metres high, it towers in the Turbine Hall—silent and heavy, bearing the sealed fear of a war that never came. The sculpture is titled Swallows’ Nest, a name in which solidity and weight yield to an unexpected lightness.

Nearby, in close dialogue with the sculpture, the film Eklipsis unfolds. Persson is almost absent as a protagonist; instead, we move among the village children, their gaze resting on him and his work. The Scanian farmland stretches out before us. We find ourselves in a time that is no more—and yet remains recognisable: children, then as now, watching the adult world, trying to make sense of it. Persson’s endeavour seeps into their den-building; anxiety becomes play—in deadly earnest.

Illustrations from the 1943 civil defence pamphlet flicker past: shelters, protective stances, and the coded signals of sirens. A radio clutched in the hand; a gas mask drawn over the face. At a certain moment, a child’s voice recounts how the village gathers to witness a solar eclipse, and how Persson reads the sudden darkness as the coming of war:

“The birds fell silent.
Someone shouts, “The war is coming!” It’s Karl.
He’s running towards us, stumbling through the darkness.
Everyone stares at him.”

John Skoog (born 1985 in Kvidinge, Sweden) is an artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen. REDOUBT marks the culmination of a fifteen-year artistic project following Persson’s life and work. In conjunction with the exhibition, Skoog’s new feature film—also titled REDOUBT—premiered in Swedish cinemas.

Edi Hila: Brutna horisonter / Fractured Horizons
November 8, 2025–April 12, 2026
Curator: Joa Ljungberg

With tones of pink, blue, and gold set against the greyness of concrete, Edi Hila’s paintings evoke both the weight of history and the fragility of dreams. Born in Shkodër in 1944, Hila has lived through Albania’s political extremes—from the aftermath of Italian and German occupation, through decades of communist dictatorship and isolation, to the shock-and-awe implementation of global capitalism. In his paintings, we move through dust-laden city streets; yet their stillness and subdued palette anchor them in a painterly tradition that stretches back centuries. His practice remains attuned to the legacies of the Italian Renaissance.

In many works, the viewer’s gaze is obstructed, prevented from reaching the horizon’s promise and uncertainty. Public buildings rise as sealed monuments—custodians of former regimes’ faded utopias and of lingering memories of violent suppression. Elsewhere, against a darkening sky, a solitary ship fractures the line between sea and sky. Laden with migrants, it presses towards the picture plane, bearing the fragile projection of another life.

People of the Future has been acquired for the Moderna Museet collection. Painted in the aftermath of the collapse of Albania’s dictatorship, it reflects the turmoil of the late 1990s. A ship looms against a darkening sky. Its searchlight cuts through the twilight, casting a stark white circle reminiscent of a menacing, all-seeing eye—a Cyclops. On deck, a dense black mass of figures emerges: restless, compressed, their forms and faces indistinct. Some appear to have been pushed overboard, plunging into the merciless waters below.

The painting responds to the tragedy of Otranto, when an Italian military vessel rammed a boat carrying Albanian migrants, causing it to sink and many on board to drown. Within its dense atmosphere, muffled foghorn signals seem to reverberate, punctuated by waves crashing against the hull—like snarling wolves closing in on their prey.

Edi Hila (born 1944) lives and works in Tirana. His work gained international recognition with Albania’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Since then, he has been the subject of major solo exhibitions across Europe. A landmark presentation at documenta 14, in Athens and Kassel, consolidated his position as a central voice in contemporary art.

The exhibition—Edi Hila's first solo presentation in Scandinavia and Germany—has been conceived and curated by Joa Ljungberg (Moderna Museet Malmö) and Corinne Diserens (Hamburger Kunsthalle). It is co-produced by Moderna Museet Malmö and Hamburger Kunsthalle and is accompanied by a multilingual catalogue published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Catalogue

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.