At night, the boundaries between the rational and the irrational become blurred. Secret meetings take place, dreams reveal inner desires, and the frightening suddenly seems very real. Darkness seems to give us a richer understanding of what it means to be alive. The exhibition Nocturnal Games brings together artworks from Ingela Ihrman’s practice from 2006 to the present day, establishing a space where play and desire take centre stage.

In a twilight land populated by large-scale sculpture, video and performance, we encounter a series of characters made by hand with everyday materials that have been found, bought or recycled. Here, a shaggy, pink-grey privet hawk moth flutters across the floor, carefully constructed from cardboard and fabric. The beautiful but fleeting moths appear in the exhibition as an undercurrent full of their own desires: they long for light and to loudly suck nectar from lilacs and wild honeysuckle with their long proboscises.

Among flowering cacti, burning giant hogweed and bleeding mulberries, a sincere desire to get close and linger in borderline states stands out. A characteristic humour is also a recurring theme. In the video work The Fertile Crescent (2024), inspired by a sketch with comedy character Papphammar, the artist carries a monumental ear of barley from the field to the foaming waves of the sea in a kind of sowing and assisted fertilisation. In Harvest Moon(2025), a bat boils red mixed juice from the summer’s berry harvest in the church’s stone cellar, seemingly unconcerned about how bats are seen as ominous creatures in Christianity’s notions of guilt and sin.

Through Ihrman’s persistent exploration of what it means to be a living body; a biological creature that strives, longs, eats, gives birth, feeds and desires, she also reminds us of the potential of play. ”The reason why it is so enjoyable to engage with art or poetry is precisely because it allows one to immerse oneself in one’s own forbidden games and dreams for a little while”, she says in the new book Queen of the Night – Ingela Ihrman, published in conjunction with the exhibition. Play is a powerful technique. It makes other futures possible by exercising the imagination and testing what has not yet taken place.

At a time when nature is explained by science and controlled by technology, it is important to ask what is lost in our human experience. Nocturnal Games reminds us that deep beneath the surface of reason and civilisation lies something older, darker and more uncontrollable. Under a moon that resembles a cheese, in a time that balances on the edge between technological hubris and apocalyptic despair, Ingela Ihrman formulates a longing to venture into the dark corners and feelings that lie there – and allows us to touch them.

Caroline Malmström, curator

Biography

Ingela Ihrman (b. 1985, Kalmar, Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm. Her work is sparked by the strong emotions of everyday life and a desire to understand, question or express what it’s like to be alive, social, fertile or human. It is particularly the pleasures and pain that come with co-existence, loneliness and desire that intrigues her.

Ingela Ihrman’s solo shows include presentations at Malmö Konsthall (2024); Carl Eldh Studio Museum, Stockholm (2023); Gasworks, London (2023) der TANK, Institut Kunst, FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel (2017) and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016). She participated in A velvet ant, a flower and a bird at Potter Museum in Melbourne (2026); Helsinki Biennale (2025); OFF-Biennale, Budapest (2025); Yokohama Triennale (2020); Nordic Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and 11th Gwangju Biennale, The Eighth Climate (2016).

Image: Ingela Ihrman, Nocturnal Games, 2026. Photo: Bonniers Konsthall (Jean-Baptiste Béranger)