Åsa Jungnelius
The Cavity
Until 23 August 2025
Õrebro Konsthall, Sweden
“When I first encountered Åsa Jungnelius’s Snippan in a group exhibition many years ago, it felt as if I were standing before an object seemingly birthed from a celestial body – both distant and strangely familiar. It was as impossible to enter as it was to remain unaffected beside it. The world of the artwork bled into the world around me with its intensity. I remember it as if it were yesterday: how completely present I was in the room, while simultaneously forgetting everything else that existed there – everything except Snippan and me.”
Snippan is the answer to an unfathomable question, not unlike the mystery of life’s origin. This early seminal work by Åsa Jungnelius invites us to question how we and artworks can coexist. Rather than positioning us as spectators, it and Jungnelius’ visual universe urge us to become participants, teetering between stepping in and stepping out. What begins with a breath—essentially the glassblower’s puff—brings life into a shell, which the creator slowly retreats from to invite the audience in. We witness how the work’s interior is born at the same time it becomes a façade. An inside-out manifestation born of a female experience, it boldly embraces the grandiose, the monumental, and the universally human. Jungnelius has continued to explore cavities, passages, channels, vessels, and frames in a series of artworks. An exploration that leads to a deceptively simple realization: there is a world outside the artwork, and one inside it.
Åsa Jungnelius is one of our most acclaimed contemporary artists, perhaps because she so masterfully exposes the boundary between viewer and object. This revelation is expressed through the works gathered in this exhibition—especially those that are also functional objects, where the distinction between viewer and user is playfully challenged and implicitly politicized. There is a consistency in how this simultaneous boundary and opening between us and the work reappears across different materials, contexts, and ideas in Jungnelius’ long and rich oeuvre. Her visual world is unique precisely because of this consistency. It even reappears in her self-presentation as an artist, her public persona. The surface is never superficial in Jungnelius’ work—nor is it false. Instead, the tension between the inside and the outside of the work is almost always physically palpable.
_ Axel Andersson, Historian, writer, and lecturer in art history at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.
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About the exhibition
Taking its starting point in the now iconic work Snippan – part of Åsa Jungnelius’s graduation exhibition Vad fin du är i håret at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, in 2004 – the exhibition at Örebro Konsthall is a chronological retrospective of her artistic practice.
Åsa Jungnelius has repeatedly explored cavities and passages – both as physical structures and metaphorical spaces, charged with questions about gender, power, identity and belonging. Through a variety of expressions, materials and feminist-coded symbols, such as the vagina and the seashell, she maintains a constant dialogue around these central themes.
About the Artist
Åsa Jungnelius (b. 1975, Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm and Månsamåla. She is educated at Konstfack in Stockholm.
Jungnelius’ artistic practice entails a material exploration shifting between the monumental and the social and psychologically constructed settings. Through the physicality of the object, she inquires how identities and bodily desires are formed and expressed. Her interest in body and matter is centered around issues concerning the constant re-negotiation of these two entities throughout human history.
With her early works in glass, Jungnelius made her breakthrough and has since held the position as one of Sweden’s leading artists within the field. Since the early 2000s, she has exhibited regularly in Sweden and internationally, while also initiating the interdisciplinary project Residence-In-Nature, the craft collective WeWorkInAFragileMaterial, and LASTSTUDIO. Recent public commissions include “Den inre världsutställningen” (2023) – a process-based work for Södra Hamnen in Norrköping with both temporary and permanent elements and “Snäckan” (2015–2027) – a large-scale installation for the new subway station in Hagastaden, Stockholm.
Jungnelius is represented in prominent collections, both public and private worldwide, including Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, the European Parliament art collection, Röhska Museet, and the Swedish Public Art Agency. In 2022, she was named an honorary doctor at Linnaeus University’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
