Landmärkt / Land Marked
05.06.2025-15.06.2025
A guest exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö showing four internationally active artists from Lebanon, born in the 1970s and 1990s, three of whom were exhibiting in Sweden for the first time.
Artists Marwa Arsanios, Afram Chamoun, Nadim Choufi, and Dala Nasser engage in a dialogue with landscapes that have been shaped—and reshaped—by political, economic, and diplomatic forces. Through diverse artistic processes and expressions, they investigate sites marked by physical interventions, examining how these traces endure and erode over time.
The impact of capitalist and colonial infrastructures on land use, geopolitics, and war leaves profound marks on land, oceans, and living bodies—manifesting as displacement, grief, fragmented identities, and contested memories. The artists' works draw attention to these traces, while also exploring the potential for renegotiating historical narratives.
Documentation and materiality are used to uncover embedded histories, reactivate memories, and, at the same time, formulate something new. Land Marked looks to the past and gestures towards the future — critically reflecting on the abstraction of land, nature, and capital, and making visible the forces that continue to shape the ground beneath us.
The exhibition was made possible with support from the City of Malmö. Moderna Museet Malmö was generously hosting the exhibition, including the Lecture Performance with Nadim Choufi, The View from Above Takes My Breath Away – Fully, 2023, on June 5, supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage.
Curators: Marie-Nour Hechaime and Sara Rossling
Land as palimpsest: continuous shapings of land
From the representational paintings of the Renaissance to contemporary art—the human view and approaches to landscape and nature have changed with time. Land as a palimpsest, marked over time—by ownership, colonization, warfare, extractions, and climate change—continues to alter its status and affect living conditions. Derived from the Dutch word 'landschap', the term 'landscape' acknowledges a mutual shaping of nature and people. Seen as a process, land is improved for us to gain from it. We, humans, have systematized its use and the moral rights to claim it.
In her essay, A River (2022), Canadian poet and essayist Lisa Robertson dwells on the recurring history of the flooding of the Bièvre River—letting the river speak through her and the nature of the river to prompt her writing. “A flood is a chartless architect,” she states and reveals its uncontrolled movements that spare no one in its path. She continues by letting her words overflow the paper in a stream that captures the force of the flood: how it washes over its edges and pushes matter from one place to another, transports materials, and dissolves previously solid objects—utterly, to permeate its surroundings till they transform from within.
The artists in Land Marked navigate trembling terrains to grapple with contested human marks on land: the banning of species and traditional herding, toxic landfilling, and environmental disasters caused by oil spills. Simultaneously, the artists capture the immaterial, eroded, and erased—but not forgotten. As the ambiguous title Land Marked, the works also bring forth resilience and sustenance through the black goat and the mastic tree. The works in the exhibition give voice to displaced humans and animals and silenced memories of their landscapes—calling on us here in Malmö to engage in their ongoing situation and future.
Sara Rossling
Haunting Grounds: a grammar of spills and fills
Rooted in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Greece, the works in the exhibition make perceptible the processes of extraction and circulation that lie at the core of the current world system. The infrastructures of settler colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism have left their marks across these historically and geographically linked territories as they have elsewhere. Oil, for example, is everywhere: embedded in countless everyday products, fuelling energy-dependent lifestyles, and flowing often unseen through vast transnational pipelines.
In his seminal novel Cities of Salt, Abdelrahman Munif describes the transformation brought about by the discovery of oil in a fictional desert town resembling parts of the Arabian Peninsula. One of its central figures, Miteb al-Hathal—a proud tribal leader and fierce opponent of the oil company—vanishes early in the narrative. After repeatedly confronting those complicit in the destruction of his world, he disappears into the landscape—never seen again, but never fully gone. His name lingers like a spell, evoked as a promise of vengeful return.
The works in Land Marked all trace and retrace the ghostly imprints of exploitation: ink bleeds into paper mimicking oil and land, fabric absorbs the wound of a tree, and goat hair recalls the violence of settler colonialism. They ask how abstraction—of land, of value, of matter—has allowed capital to move frictionlessly, while bodies remain tethered to grief, displacement, and toxicity. In this moment, as Gaza is being buried beneath concrete, pixelated, and erased in real time, we are reminded again of what disappears and what persists. The haunting disappearance of Munif’s character in Cities of Salt offers a counterpoint through which to read landscapes—not as passive, but as active sites of loss, struggle, and survival. What marks the land is not only what is built upon it, but what is taken away, what is forbidden, what is made unseeable.
Marie-Nour Hechaime