Stockholm Cosmologies is a group exhibition that focuses on the international and cosmopolitan nature of the city’s contemporary art scene. The exhibition brings together fifteen artists working across various media such as video, performance, installation, sculpture, painting, and textiles.

In the second part of the curatorial project that began with Stockholm Cosmology (2024), Liljevalchs continues its survey of the Swedish art scene by considering various contact zones—in this iteration, turning its gaze further afield.

Stockholm Cosmologies represents a constellation of relations across geographies and temporalities. These contact zones are historic as well as temporary—in some cases fleeting, in others sustained through memory, and often overlapping. One contact zone stems from the diplomatic relations between Sweden and the South African government in exile during the 1970s and 1980s, a relationship rooted in solidarity and kinship.

However, the exhibition resists the framing of an historic set of relations. Other considerations are the lived lives of artists and the liminal aspects of being situated in-between two geographies. The practice of South African-born artist Lefifi Tladi, and his life of exile, existing between Sweden and South Africa, is a departure point for the curatorial journey. Queerness is a zone of contact, as are the legacies of Dutch colonial violence, linking artists from the southern tip of Africa to the Carribbean, and returning to Sweden.

Stockholm Cosmologies leans into the notion of ‘parallel aesthetics’—an articulation by the late Koyo Kouoh, in the framing of the exhibition When We See Us (currently on view at Liljevalchs+). These two exhibitions also form a contact zone, in the physical connection between the  two buildings of Liljavalchs—one more than a century old, at this moment holding contemporary artists; the other, a contemporary building holding a century of painting.

Stockholm Cosmologies is the result of dialogues between two curators and their networks and relations, their respective worlds brought into a zone of contact, contained for the duration of the exhibition within the walls of Liljevalchs.

All of the fifteen participating artists are active in multiple geographies—spanning Scandinavia, Africa, and its diaspora. Together, they form a spectrum of experiences that spans generations, materials, and geographies. The exhibition includes emerging artists as well as those who have been active for a longer time. Several of the works were made in 2025 and many of them are site-specific, produced especially for Liljevalchs.

Stockholm Cosmologies takes as its starting point the concept of cosmology, not in its scientific sense, but rather as a poetic and political model for how artists relate to the world, time, place, material, and to one another. A cosmology can be seen as a worldview, an inner map or an artistic orientation. In speaking of cosmologies in the plural, the exhibition seeks to illuminate the myriad expressions that take place in artists’ studios, as well as the unexpected parallels, ruptures, and reflections that can arise between artists who have neither met nor heard of each other, and who work on different continents.

Stockholm Cosmologies is not an attempt to define the Swedish art scene but rather to offer a multifaceted and relational picture of what is going on within it right now. It is a proposal to see it as something open, contradictory, and in constant change—yet globally intertwined. A place where artistic cosmologies and aesthetics co-exist, collide, mirror each other and, sometimes, unfold in parallel.

The exhibition features the artists Filippa Arrias, Igshaan Adams, Karim Boumjimar, Loulou Cherinet, Theresa Traore Dahlberg, Garth Erasmus, Sara-Vide Ericson, Salad Hilowle, Bronwyn Katz, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Kayo Mpoyi, Pia Sandström, Inga Somdyala, Ylva Snöfrid and Lefifi Tladi.