Umeå Academy of Fine Arts / Of Love and Care

This year’s degree show from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University presents works by Christian Abrahamsson, Amanda Angeli Blombäck, Time Bohlin, Renan De Menezes Anan, Elna Dani Liljedahl, Joanne Löfling, Måns Palmberg, Sofia Tien, Fanny Åberg and Tin Åling, all of whom are graduating from the master’s programme at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. Curator and principal supervisor is artist Maria Lantz.

The exhibition Of Love and Care is the culmination of a period of intensive work. During the master’s programme, the students have created images, films, sounds and sculptures based on themes that deeply engage them. After working with materials, forms and content, they have decided on what they want to show their audience, in dialogue with each other and with their supervisors.

This year, the exhibition shows how art can reflect cultural encounters and expressions of love and care, the mysteries of existence and the irritations of everyday life. The works offer insights into where contemporary art finds itself today.

Introduction

When mysterious or inexplicable experiences affect people, they are rejected in the name of rationality, instead they are regarded as irrelevant, superstition, fiction or nonsense. Industrialisation has made society comfortable and safe, but also rational and technological. However, there are still gaps that science or material development has been unable to fill. Such as issues related to consciousness: The existence of the soul beyond the body, the afterlife, our dreams at night, love and reverence for nature – these sensations remain mysteries. Might the brain be an intermediary between the body and something significantly different? The questions are by no means new, but the riddles about ourselves remain.

Thus, in response to life’s big questions, myths and spirituality have played second fiddle to scientific advances. Here, we can see that modern society has led not only to comfort but also to a kind of existential emptiness, a confusion about the meaning of life, in combination with global imbalances between people, nature and the climate.

In the exhibition Of Love and Care, there are traces of ancient thoughts about life – everyday phenomena and existence beyond the measurable. The artists are moving beyond news feeds and social media, and further away from the overtly political and consumerist messages that so strongly characterise our time. Instead, here at Bildmuseet, we are embraced by a generation of artists whose multifaceted expressions reflect love, care, astonishment, frustration and mystery. They express the wonder of existing by revealing what is hidden in the folds and the gaps between concrete reality and abstract emotions. Perhaps this is simply an act of re-enchanting the world.

Of Love and Care is the result of ten Master’s in Fine Arts students showcasing their degree projects: Amanda Angeli Blombäck, Christian Abrahamsson, Elna Dani Liljedahl, Fanny Åberg, Joanne Löfling, Måns Palmberg, Renan De Menezes Anan, Sofia Tien, Time Bohlin and Tin Åling.

Maria Lantz, curator

Artists and works

Christian Abrahamsson (b. 1984, Orust)

Jag funderar på att börja mangla, inte för att jag bryr mig om släta lakan utan som en politisk handling, 2026
[I’m thinking of starting to use a mangle, not because I care about smooth sheets but as a political act] 

Tvättmaskin I, Tvättmaskin II, Tvättmaskin III, Torkskåp
[Washing Machine I], [Washing Machine II], [Washing Machine III], [Drying Cabinet]
Linocut on paper 

Mangel
[Mangle]
Steel, spray paint, linocut on paper 

Bokningstavla
[Booking Board]
Aluminium

Den gemensamma tvättstugan
[The Communal Laundry Room]
Audio, 2:37 min

— I work with sculptural installations and print making, often in combination. In my art I look for perfection in the imperfect, touching upon themes of power, hierarchies and structural injustice.

The artworks created by Christian Abrahamsson are seemingly simple and at the same time brutal: black and white art prints, heavy sculptures; objects that become new statements. But if we look more closely, there is also a sense of humour, a poetic quality that includes both sadness and care for the themes that Abrahamsson deals with. Care is also taken in the choice of materials and techniques. His metal sculptures and large linocuts do not strive for perfection. Instead, they are the result of meticulous consideration and great craftsmanship. 

Thematically, Abrahamsson addresses ‘the emotional life of society’. More specifically, he is interested in what happens in the encounters that inevitably take place in everyone’s everyday lives, and that are part of the society we inescapably share. What characterises cohesion? What creates ‘community’, and what is becoming lost in an increasingly individualised and digitalised culture? What happens to us as individuals and groups when consumption and convenience surpass interpersonal encounters? 

Stories and texts frame Abrahamsson’s art. In the exhibition space, his art thereby appears to move far beyond the walls; the works seem to grow out of themselves, beyond the exhibition and further out into the society that both surrounds it and is its starting point. 

Amanda Angeli Blombäck (b. 1999, Kalix) 

Det här är myren, 2026 
[This Is the Mire]
Oil on linen cloth

Sist jag var här var det ju helt öppet mellan öarna, 2026
[Last time I was here, I could see all the way to the other island]
Audio, 10:17 min

Det här var havet, 2026 
[This was the sea]
Oil on linen cloth

Det här är slyn och skogen I-VII, 2026 
[This is the bush wood and the woods I-VII]
Oil on paper, mdf, canvas

— My work is site-specific, using oil painting. My art is based on – and revolves around – the island on the Norrbotten coast where I spent my childhood summers. In my work, I reflect on the traces that this harsh, contrastful and ever-changing landscape has left in me.

In Amanda Angeli Blombäck’s paintings there is an island, and on the island is a mire. A landscape where time is not counted in seconds or years, but in slow transformation over the course of decades. Here, the ground carries memories of father, grandmother, grandfather. Those who constructed houses, built and dreamed. But Blombäck also remembers through the plants, the light, the cottage where her childhood moved through the rooms. Everything bears traces of what once was, and what still is, but different. A little quieter.

Blombäck notices what shifts, and she feels what changes. With a reverence towards the secretive nature of the bog, the bog that is slowly losing itself and becoming something else through land uplift. As the ground rises up from the water, Blombäck documents this while at the same time paying homage to the place. This is a depiction of changes, but also a whisper about life itself. We will all disappear, but in the vegetation that still sprouts, hope grows for what lies ahead.

Blombäck’s painting stands in dialogue with the nature romanticism, but extends further — into the mysticism where place becomes presence, and what has been meets what will be. Here, the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s thoughts about time and place echo as a deep sense of belonging with the past and the future. When painting captures a place so that its very spirit can be discerned, a feeling beyond mere words arises. Perhaps it touches upon what we constantly seek in our existence.

Time Bohlin (b. 1997, Sjövik/Gothenburg)

Vårdar, skördar, önskar fram min nya inbillning II, 2026
[Nurturing, Harvesting, Manifesting My New Imagination II]
Installation with sculpture, drawing and video (20 min, loop)

— My process is both meticulously detail-focused and impulsively intuitive. I see the work as a creation of — and a search for — guiding light, transformation and meaning.

Through Time Bohlin’s art, we are invited into a teeming universe of abstract forms where different beings, forces and movements come together. Are we in heaven — or the underworld? In any case, it is a place beyond what is immediately visible, a place where imagination flows and opens doors to mystery and new ways of experiencing existence.

Bohlin’s artistic expression — in images, film, sound and installation — bears traces of Gothic darkness, but also of playfulness. This world can be a place of refuge, but is more like a trampoline, a springboard that allows us to bounce back to everyday life with sharpened senses and new perspectives. It is as if, for just a moment, we have seen the world through a kaleidoscope where everything is recognisable, yet, renewed by new perspectives. It offers both relief and healing, stimulation and a certain frisson. There is darkness and secrecy here, but also curiosity, pleasure and an opportunity to open the door to spiritual dimensions through Bohlin’s imagery.

Renan De Menezes Anan (b. 1999, São Paulo, Brazil) 

Kabuto, 2025 
[Helmet]
Steel, copper, bronze, wood, leather, found reindeer horn 

Jingasa, 2026 
[War Hat]
Steel, copper, bronze, wood, leather 

ᛁᛅᚱᚾ, 2025
[Iron]
Copperplate and etching

— My artistic practice explores identity, heritage and multiculturalism through the creation of sculptural artifacts. Combining traditional materials, such as metal and wood, and mixing in contemporary digital techniques, I explore provenance, personal experience and the intersections between different traditions, materials, experiences and cultures. In this way, I create completely new original objects — the result of meticulous craftsmanship and my thorough research. 

In Renan De Menezes Anan’s world, alloying is more than just a technique — it is a thought, a movement, a way of being. When metals are forged together, something new emerges. Something stronger, which can be both malleable and flexible. This process also applies in the encounter between other materials, and in a transferred sense; in the encounter between hands and matter, between objects and history, and between the past and the present. 

But above all, the encounter occurs at the intersection between cultures, rituals and symbols — the traces of life at different times and in different geographies. Amid the friction and the fusion, something new appears that seems stronger than the old. Perhaps man has always mirrored himself in the other, borrowed shapes, colours and meanings, and then combined and merged. 

De Menezes Anan’s work manifests itself in print-making and sculptures, but everything can be seen as a kind of self-portrait: Roots that wind their way from Europe and Japan to Brazil, and now onwards to Sweden. These roots have been joined together. Myth and matter, symbol and substance, genes and languages. Cult objects, fragments, narratives… there are certainly common features in the expressions of cultures that echo through history and across the world. Perhaps we all share a common core. Then, a symbol of Brazil’s indigenous people can whisper to Japanese ornamentation, in an embrace in the middle of a Nordic forest. 

Elna Dani Liljedahl (b. 1994, Gothenburg)

Ändlöst svall, 2026
[Infinite Surge]
3-channel video (32 min, loop)

Ängel, 2026 (Displayed in the stairwell on floor 3)
[Angel]
Liquid ink on wall

En linje utan slut, 2026
[A Line Without End]
Performance at the opening

— I work with experiences, traces left inside me, and traces left in the external world. I then transform these into something to show: new imprints, marks, echoes. I work in several different mediums, including music, sound, performance, video, drawing, tattooing, printmaking, set design, costume making and installation. The traces of an action, the documentation of the movement. Movement as flowing water, energy in motion.

For Elna Dani Liljedahl, the line between life and art is a thin one — one that has almost dissolved. Sounds, music, voices, rituals…their own voice, body and interactions with the surroundings are as important as the set designs, textile sculptures, tattoos and music that Liljedahl creates. The expression of their own body is thus intertwined with fellow artists and band members, with friends and with us, the audience.

In Liljedahl’s art, we are invited to question categories and predetermined norms of behaviour. Here, there is an artistic tradition; a chain in which Liljedahl is a link. One example is the Situationists of the 1960s, who criticised the conformity of modern industrial society. They paid tribute to the playful human, Homo Ludens, and saw play as an alternative to work and consumption. In a similar way, Elna Dani’s art points towards being together as an active act in order to find community around being amused, moved, worried or delighted. A call to live life to the full, and where nature is also a relationship to cherish.

Liljedahl’s art thereby moves in the opposite direction to the state of despair that often characterises our time. A gesture of generosity, of hope, and of faith in the genuineness of life.

Joanne Löfling (b. 1995, Umeå)

Agn, 2026
[Chaff]
Sculptures in steel, grain, jute, water and salt

Överväxt, 2026 (Displayed on Floor 1)
[Overgrowth]
Sculpture in steel, grain, jute, water and salt

— There’s a force field that draws me to explore hidden boundaries, how personal energies arise and operate within them. I draw lines of furrows along the field, growing in wide, parallel arcs. Balancing where it dips down towards the edge of the ditch. My hands search for handles. I plough, I dig and I scrape. Fertilising and spreading nutrition together with the bodies of the machines, sowing in long rows and watching the expectations that follow. The harvest separates the grain from the chaff. I want to make the most of the transformation.

In Joanne Löfling’s art, earth meets action. The act of ploughing is central. It brings to mind processes such as cultivation and sowing, but also wear and tear. The arch is the recurring form in her sculptures. It seems to span the past, the present and the future, thereby expressing a closeness to life that is constantly in motion due to seasons and climate.

Löfling works from her homestead, a farm and a place where the soil has been cultivated by her family for generations. Today, she grows her own grain, which is ground into flour and mixed with salt and water. This is then combined with jute fabric, oxidising metals and minerals. The mixture becomes a unique material with which to clothe the metal skeletons that Löfling welds herself. This is how the fragrant objects are formed; sculptures or beings. We are invited into a world where tenderness, consolation and existential questions lean towards the forest and the land, the sky and the earth.

Måns Palmberg (b. 1995, Långshyttan)

Stillebenmåleri, 2026
[Still Life Painting] 
Oil on mdf and canvas, various sizes

— My painting is based on a growing collection of flea market finds, sculptures, junk and various materials. I arrange the objects back and forth on my table in the studio until I find a motif that feels exciting to paint. I’m inspired by the possibilities of image-making and the variation that different still lifes bring to my painting. I’m also just as curious about mixing and applying paint as I am about exploring which kinds of images I can create.

Måns Palmberg moves with the same wonder at the nature of painting as at the world itself. Objects, phenomena, moments — in his hands, everyday details dissolve and take on new forms. A still life becomes an interpretation, a displacement, an opening. Through Palmberg’s art, perhaps we see things not as they were, and not as they are, but as they might yet be?

On the panel, a transformation is taking place. A toy horse becomes a real horse. Or a… well, something else. Something that is emerging, but does not have a name yet. Palmberg plays. He plays with found objects and stones, with remnants, debris and trinkets. It is a game that stems from a seriousness. Or is it the other way around? Does the seriousness come out through play? After all, what do we really know — about the world we move in, about what we think we see, about the images that reflect but also displace?

Painting is Palmberg’s way of listening. It is slow. It requires presence, a kind of deeper gaze. And in what is painted, a space opens up — without language, but full of meaning. We have to stop there. Wonder and feel. Maybe the laughter will come first. Maybe the idea. Maybe they are the same thing.

Sofia Tien (b. 1997, Stockholm)

Skogsflytare, 2026
[Forest Wanderers]
Oil on panel

Flyga kräla dansa, 2026
[Flying Crawling Dancing]
Oil on panel

Kollagebok, 2024–2026
[Collage Book]
Mixed Media

My God, Where Are You?, 2026
Performance at the opening (Approx. 30 min)

— I remember an interview with a priest who spoke about human relationships, especially the close couple relationships where you know each other perhaps best of all. And yet there is always a distance. He emphasised the importance of showing respect for the mystery of the other — of cherishing what lies deepest in someone else, a core that one should not chase after or try to uncover. This creates a dynamic and a tension, a relationship of repeated give and take.

In the close encounter between people, Sofia Tien sees a parallel with her own relationship with painting — a relationship that has now lasted for almost a decade. For Tien, painting is an enigmatic process that she understands to some extent, but does not fully want to comprehend. Painting becomes an exchange of secrets between the artist, the material, the conscious and the unconscious. She is amazed and delighted when the paint and the motifs surprise her — an event that contrasts with modern society’s obsession with the scientific, the measurable and the rational.

Fanny Åberg (b. 1995, Stockholm)

Hålla ihop, 2026 (Displayed on Floor 4)
[Holding Together]
Installation with sound (23:26 minutes), projected video loops, cotton fabric, cotton yarn, screen partition frames, and video on monitor (17:14 minutes)

— I primarily work with moving images and installation in my depiction of questions relating to illness, female roles and interpersonal relationships. By positioning my own experiences within a historical or societal context, I investigate how meaning, patterns, and shifts emerge within these areas.

In Fanny Åberg’s artistry society, body and soul all come together. She reflects on the boundaries between her own body, the psyche and the social norms we live with. How these relationships have been negotiated over time, and how they should be understood in relation to inner experiences that are just as real as houses, cars, waste management and news feeds. What is healthy and what is sick? What is private and what is universal? Where do my soul and your consciousness meet?

Åberg has personal experience of mental illness, but does not remain within the autobiographical. She uses her experiences to shed light on contemporary social structures and medical establishments, and in several of her works she has explored — with an open mind and great curiosity — how mentally ill women have been assessed, treated and portrayed throughout history.

She addresses these issues with warmth and humour, and also embraces the relatives in her search. What role is assigned to the mother of a daughter whom she wants to help but is sometimes unable to reach? What happens to feelings of guilt and shame, inability and the unending struggle for all those who are caught up in a dance where no one can manage entirely on their own? Perhaps this is where we see the greatest of acts of love: withstanding together.

Tin Åling (b. 1999, Stockholm)

En badvakts dagbok, 2024–2026
[Diary of a Lifeguard]

Hålla andan och lösa Rubiks kub i bubbelpoolen
[Holding your breath while solving a Rubik’s cube in the jacuzzi]
Punch-needle hand tufted acrylic yarn on jute fabric

”— Det står ju att man ska ha byxor när man badar?”
[“— But it says that you should wear pants in the pool?”]
Punch-needle hand tufted acrylic yarn on jute fabric

Sjöjungfru på besök
[Mermaid visiting]
Punch-needle hand tufted acrylic yarn on jute fabric

Varför bajsar man inte bara i toaletten?
[Why not just poop in the toilet?]
Punch-needle hand tufted acrylic yarn on jute fabric

Videoanimationer ”En badvakts dagbok” (2024–2026)
[Video animations “Diary of a Lifeguard”]
Digital animations 

— In my art, I’m interested in people and their behaviour in interaction with others and with themselves. I depict human situations in an attempt to understand, decode and approach my own reality. Through the repetition of needlework and the warmth of textiles, I take care of and cherish the everyday life that I share with others. In my stylistically simple, colourful and textile works, the present is softened; human behaviour is dissected and simplified to attract attention. I create a parallel reality where the world is seen through my eyes.

Amid the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we constantly encounter people who irritate us, situations that get tangled up, confusions and misunderstandings. Tin Åling gathers up these narratives and transforms them into images. It is Åling’s everyday life that we see, but it is also the everyday life that we share as people and as members of society. Banal events that cause a stir… they are life’s hardships, but they are also life’s comedy.

However, Åling does not stop at simply recording in the form of drawings and animations. Through the slow method of tufting, the images grow into spatial works when the yarn meets the fabric. Thick mats of threads and colour. Tufting is a quiet act, but it requires perseverance. In a persistent rhythm of hands working, craftsmanship takes its soft form. Thread by thread. The carpet is both a surface and an object, and it carries the passage of time.

At the same time, the motifs also capture the immediacy of the moment. We are caught between speed and slowness, irritation and patience, dirtiness and cleanliness. And onwards: Between body and shadow, fragility and rawness, indifference and desire. Åling shows us a world of frustration, empathy and hilarious humour.