An Act of Attention

What does it mean to turn our attention towards the world today? Bringing together photographers from different generations and contexts in Sweden and France, the exhibition approaches attention as a movement, in which our own position may change. 

This movement begins in intimate spaces and personal histories. Iris Millot turns our attention to her great-aunt Hélène, a former activist in the Women’s Liberation Movement. The traces she left are shown alongside an anonymous archival image from one of her notebooks. Hélène is never fully visible; instead, her life takes shape through the objects, rooms and everyday details, forming a portrait through her absence.

Ela Polkowska brings her attention to the body which is approached indirectly through objects that take on the qualities of skin: vulnerable, tactile and marked by contact.

In Sabbia e Bronzo, Massao Mascaro turns to the Mediterranean coast, taking its ancient history and the Riace bronzes as a point of departure. As he moves through the landscape, his attention falls on fragments and objects. Bronze endures, while sand is constantly shifting. Between the two, plastic emerges as a contemporary counterpart. Through these materials, the landscape becomes a place where traces are preserved, transformed and left behind.

 Salad Hilowle’s work asks whose presence is recognised in history. Drawing on his Somali heritage and the African diaspora in Sweden, he calls our attention to Black figures long present in Swedish cultural history yet often on the margins of collective memory. In Nätdragande Morian, a sculpture wrapped in a sarong is photographed and transformed into a tapestry. Associated with historical prestige, the tapestry gives the figure a new presence within a visual tradition from which Black figures have often been absent. Hilowle unsettles inherited ways of seeing and redirects our focus towards what history has left at its margins.

Tom Hallgren’s portraits place us face to face with three young men. Where the stereotypical depiction of masculinity ought to convey strength, Hallgren chooses a vulnerable intimacy. The closeness of the faces asks us to consider our own position as viewers and the relationship formed through looking. What can a photograph reveal about another person, and what remains beyond our reach?

Theo Elias attends to the photograph itself and its relationship with reality. Through darkroom processes, collage, installation and spray paint he transforms his images layer by layer. For him, photographs need to be activated through these interventions, each alteration shifting the image between representation and fiction. Black-and-white photographs of Nordic environments meet saturated red images of poppies. The fragile flower carries associations of beauty and passion, grief and death. In this movement between reality and fiction, his photography becomes a way of returning to and processing memory.

In Marguerite Bornhauser’s work, materiality takes another direction. Intense colour and light make the world she photographs appear heightened, almost dreamlike. Some films are developed in seawater and stained by salt, allowing elements of the landscape to enter the photographic process itself. Her images transform the world while carrying physical traces of it, bringing together a tangible connection to the landscape and a sense of something out of reach.

Developed through a collaboration between the Hasselblad Foundation and Institut suédois, the project also includes a masterclass for the photographers with Sophie Ristelhueber, the 2025 Hasselblad Award laureate. Ristelhueber’s work attends to traces in landscapes and bodies, exploring how histories and experiences leave their marks. The masterclass brings the photographers together at a particular point in time. In this shared moment, an act of attention takes shape as they turn towards one another’s ways of looking, opening space to question and renegotiate their own practices.

Curators: Anna Danielsson, Institut suédois and Stefan Jensen, Hasselblad Foundation