For Ingrid Segring, transcendence begins at the surface. Drawing on X-ray aesthetics, “invisible” cosmetic procedures, and images she gathers online, she paints not to reproduce illusion but to move through it, exploring the agency of images and their ability to shape perception. Ingrid Jacobsen finds transcendence in error. By subjecting analogue photography to chemical chance, she allows images to bleed, blur, and oscillate between abstraction and figuration, inviting “failure,” leading to a space that exceeds both painting and photography. For Freddy Houndekindo, transcendence might be more embodied. Returning to childhood combat sports as a choreographer, he treats performance as a way of reclaiming the body as one’s own and reimagining a softer masculinity through intimacy, endurance, and ritualized contact. Sally von Rosen pushes transcendence towards physical matter. Her anthropomorphic bronze sculptures, at once sensual and menacing, destabilize concepts of body and identity, evoking something spiritually human. And for Ailin Mirlashari, transcendence is the weight of the collective. Working between poetry, calligraphy, photography, and social practice, she dissolves the boundary between art studio and community, inviting heightened magical realism and shared memory into a space where vulnerability and resistance coexist. These five artists survey what rests beyond “the frame,” the discipline, the self, showing how to move art beyond the habitual into the possible.
Ingrid Segring
For Ingrid Segring, pursuing art was less reinvention than return. “I’ve been drawing and painting my whole life,” she says. Growing up, art did not always appear viable as a profession. The architecture and design school offered an intellectual framework for conceptual interests, but even there, something else kept surfacing. While peers dedicated spare time to studies, Segring began each project with painting, sculpture, or image-driven ideas. By graduation, the conclusion felt inevitable: “Being an artist is basically the only possibility I can imagine.”
Her paintings unfold from contemporary image culture. Recently, she has been drawn to X-ray aesthetics and the visual language of “invisible” cosmetic procedures—faces optimized into neutrality. “I’m usually obsessing over images that have fascinating connections to how design choreographs the social imaginary,” she explains. She collects them through algorithmic drift, searching, saving, and altering, then translates them into paint. “To paint and draw is a form of image worshipping to me.”
That drive is almost surgical. Segring returns repeatedly to the question of surface: how illusion operates, how images act upon us, how they might be transcended. “We’re in an era where we are utterly confused by images. We even have to consider that the sender is aware that we question whether something is AI, modified, or real, and might use our doubt to their advantage,” she notes. Alongside her studio practice, Segring co-founded the nomadic exhibition platform tilde (~), dedicated to process and the unfinished. “If you look at the art scene and realize there is something you miss, you can create that space yourself.” The ethos mirrors her canvases: searching, not settling for the given surface.
Ingrid Jacobsen
Fresh from her MFA at Malmö Art Academy and already included in two award exhibitions, she speaks about this early moment with measured focus. “I’m grateful for the recognition,” she says, “but most of all it has allowed me more time for studio work.” Momentum, for Jacobsen, is quiet and continuous.
Her practice began in the darkroom with collage: layering negatives and referencing painting, exploring the space between the two. When Malmö’s master’s program lacked a color darkroom, she was temporarily stalled, but the interruption became generative. A residency in Oslo introduced her to improvised ground-pipe developing baths for large prints. Back in her own studio, she constructed similar baths, this time using color chemicals.
Color processing requires strict precision, exact temperatures, and timing, but Jacobsen’s early experiments often fell short. “The images seemed to bleed and blur, but in a fascinating and beautiful way,” she says. Rather than correcting these deviations, she let chance play a role, embracing motion and movement within the prints. “By failing and letting chance be part of the process, I somehow got closer to what I was searching for—the space between painting and photography,” she reflects.
This interest in instability extended into film with Mirror Error (2025), shown alongside her still works, and continues in photograms and sculptural experiments that push photography into three dimensions. “I like to be free in my practice,” she says. “I am still curious.”
Soon, curiosity will take her to New York on an assistant grant with Roe Ethridge. In the studio, she now recalibrates, mastering temperature and timing, yet remains attentive to what escapes control. The image is most alive at the point where it almost comes undone.
Ailin Mirlashari
For Ailin Mirlashari, the studio has never been a singular room. “My process usually starts long before I enter any studio space,” she says. It begins in conversations, in memory, and in everyday encounters. For years, her living room doubled as a site of making, life, and work inseparable. With a background in grassroots organizing and networks such as StreetGäris, she carries communal attentiveness into her solo practice. “Even when I’m physically alone, I’m never really alone in the studio. I bring people with me, stories, shared experiences,” she explains.
Trained not only as an artist but also as a social worker, Mirlashari has long navigated spaces inside and outside the structures of the art world. Before art school, she worked for years in civil society, joking that she wanted to become Sweden’s first “culture social worker.” Growing up in a home where politics and culture were intertwined, she found the transition to a highly individualized art education unsettling. “Who am I now?” she remembers wondering. Rebuilding that confidence became formative. “There are many ways of being an artist. This is mine.”
Her series Blombecknarna, recently presented in a group exhibition, unfolds as a magical realist narrative about three flower dealers hustling to survive while quietly saving the world. Poetry by Forough Farrokhzad and Karin Boye appears on their garments in Persian calligraphy, text transformed into gesture and form. “Calligraphy is not just text—it’s movement, body,” she notes. Through these figures, she explores collective survival, tenderness, and resistance, inviting viewers into a poetic register where exhaustion and hope coexist.
Looking ahead, Mirlashari is seeking playfulness over productivity, questioning linear career paths and allowing movement in circles. “Not seeing art as prestation, but as a way of living,” she says. Practically, this means letting projects unfold in their own time, rather than schedules or expectations.
Sally von Rosen
Sally von Rosen works with material and form, exploring how bronze carries weight physically and emotionally. She spent several years in Berlin, learning from assisting another artist and from the community she found there. “Every detail is as important as one chooses it to be. If one part of a sculpture is bothering you, you have to fix it, no matter how long it takes, while still somehow keeping the deadline,” she says, a discipline she continues to practice.
Her sculptures suggest human presence without being literal. Limbs bend unexpectedly; surfaces gleam yet hold tension. Von Rosen is interested in the transference of emotions, from artist to object to viewer, and in how a sculpture can produce multiple responses at once. “If looking at a sculpture gives you multiple responses or associations that might not even fit together, I think that’s great. It means you want to keep thinking about it,” she explains. She adds that contradictions are important in generating affect.
Bronze is more than a medium; it is a partner. She considers what it can endure, weight, fire, acid, impact, and how it can appear fragile while remaining resilient. “I want everything to be possible,” she says. She wants to continue making the works bigger, to allow more to be experienced, and emphasizes that longevity is part of her practice: “I want the work to be there in a thousand years.”
Her upcoming solo exhibition, On Three Legs, presents new podiums and monumental bronzes, including Rebirth Machine, a 190-centimeter figure from a surreal ritual universe. The sculpture involves gestures with eggs and stockings and stands like a deity or apparatus. Though titled a machine, it is handmade, a contradiction she embraces. “In certain situations, I think the human body itself can feel like a machine too.”
Freddy Houndekindo
Freddy Houndekindo’s path from wrestling mats to the stage has been circuitous and deeply embodied. “I grew up wrestling,” he recalls. “Around middle school, I got into a brawl and was injured, and that’s when I discovered dance and quit wrestling.” Years later, a difficult personal situation pushed him to reclaim his body through movement. “As a dancer, I felt like my body wasn’t mine anymore. In reaction to that, I started training again, reclaiming my body, its identity, and a sense of integrity, which set me on a new artistic path.” His work has grown from this lived experience, exploring combat and contact sports as sites to investigate masculinity, violence, and intimacy.
Transitioning from a dancer at the world-renowned Cullberg company to fine art was both a shift and a continuation. “As a dancer, you’re a support for guest artists’ ideas; your body is literally a vessel for their practices, aesthetic preferences, and ways of seeing. After six years, I felt the need to pause and give myself time to distinguish what is mine and integrated, and what is merely reminiscent of someone else’s work.” Through the MFA at the Royal Institute of Art, he has gained new tools to articulate his artistic voice while maintaining the core of his practice.
This spring, Houndekindo has been activating When We See Us at Liljevalchs, performing guided walks that interweave his personal stories with the exhibition’s artworks, spoken in French, Fongbe, and English. “To mimic organic cycles, I perform monthly for the entire duration of the exhibition. That extended duration anchors performance in a different temporality in relation to the visual art context and gives me the possibility to excavate more stories, as well as speculate further about life on the continent,” he explains.
Masculinity is another lens in his work. “Masculinities intersect with race, class, sexuality, and nationality; they are dynamic and contextual,” he says. Through his Instagram account @moods_of_manhood, he observes contemporary masculinity and the expression of intimacy, often in sport, without sexualizing it.
In the studio, his practice continues to expand. He is preparing ceramic works for firing, as well as developing a performance installation for his solo show at Galleri Mejan, and collaborating on a choreographic installation with 16 pre-professional dancers from the bachelor’s program in Dance at Stockholm University of the Arts. “Ceramics are a time-based medium, very much like performance,” he notes, drawing attention to the connection
Words by Ashik and Koshik Zaman
Art Credits:
1) Ingrid Segring, Hunden Hugo (Hugo the Dog), 2025, Photography by Jesper Dahl.
2) Ingrid Segring, Party Princess 1, 2025, oil on canvas, Part of group show tilde(~) No.1, Photography by Therese Norgren.
3) Ingrid Segring, The Procedure, 2026, oil on canvas, Photography by Ingrid.
4) Ingrid Segring, ”Som om vi hade trevligt” (“As If We Had a Good Time”), 2025, graphite on paper, Photography by Ingrid.
5 & 8) Ingrid Jacobsen, Mirror Error and Silver I, 2025, installation view, exhibited in Shift Focus Drift.
6 & 7) Ingrid Jacobsen, Shift Focus Drift, 2025, installation view, KHM2, Malmö.
9, 10, 11, 12 & 13) Blombecknarna/ Flowerdealers, The Sun Never Says to Earth, You Owe Me, Gole bi Goldoon, Hinner Du Andas Mellan & Eyes On, Photography by Ailin Mirlashari.
14) Sally von Rosen, Anankēs Playbunnies, 2025, Courtesy of the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm and Paris, Photography by Roman März.
15 & 16) Sally von Rosen, Skinned and Spined, Constellations, 2025, Courtesy of WHOISPOLA, Warsaw, Photography by Bartosz Górka.
17) Sally von Rosen, Rind (Motherform) II, 2025, Courtesy of the Artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm and Paris, Photography by Joe Clark.
18) Freddy Houndekindo, FREDDY, Courtesy of the Artist, Photography by Ben Beagent.
19) Freddy Houndekindo, I am worried for men, Courtesy of the Artist, Photography by Urban Jören.
20) Freddy Houndekindo, Hlstm_eareye, Courtesy of the Artist, Photography by Henrik Heikki Hellström.