© Inka & Niclas
LOCATION: Landskrona Konsthall. MAP. Buy festival tickets.
For nearly two decades, Inka and Niclas Lindergård have explored nature through the camera, not to document it, but to probe how we come to see it. Rooted in photography, their practice examines how our gaze is shaped by popular culture, technology, and the aesthetic ideals of the present. The result is a body of work that moves fluidly between photography, sculpture, and installation, where the boundaries between medium and subject are in constant flux.
Inka Lindergård was born in 1985 in Åland, and Niclas Lindergård in 1984 in Sandviken. They have lived and worked together in Stockholm since 2007. Within their visual universe, the monumental meets the overlooked, and the documentary intertwines with the staged. A wave, a sunset, or a buttercup becomes a surface onto which questions of perception, interpretation, and projection are cast. Time and again, they return to the images that shape our ideas of nature, from the sunlit vistas of travel brochures to the filtered landscapes of social media, testing what happens when these familiar motifs are manipulated, heightened, or abstracted.
At the heart of their work lies the notion of nature as a cultural construct. In a secular age, where landscapes are often charged with existential meaning, their intensified, at times almost absurd, renderings of the natural world can feel provocative. Yet they also reveal our own role in this process: our impulse to beautify, filter, and frame the world around us.
Moving between the intimate and the distant, from the dense life at the roadside to the artificial glow of the horizon, they use the camera as both a magnifying lens and a mirror. Through experiments with light, color, material, and spatial experience, they dissolve the static surface of photography, transforming it into something dynamic and alive. Their work reminds us that every image is more than a fragment of reality; it is shaped by our desires, our ideas, and our ongoing effort to understand ourselves in relation to the natural world.
In encountering their work, we are left with a simple yet essential question: do we truly see what lies before us, or are we merely confronting our own expectations of what nature should be?
/Amanda Österberg
Inka and Nicklas have had exhibitions at Haus am Kleistpark, Germany, Lidköping Konsthall, Sweden, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, California, USA, Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina, USA, Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai, China, Sternenpassage, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria and Museo Fortuny, Venice, Italy, to name a few.
Their works are represented in the permanent collections of Moderna Museet (Sweden), Gothenburg Museum of Art (Sweden), Fries Museum (the Netherlands), Arendt & Art (Luxembourg), The Wienerberger Collection (Austria) and Edit Maryon Foundation (Switzerland). They were awarded the EMOP Arendt Award 2021 and The Swedish Photo Book Price 2012. They are represented by Dorothée Nilsson Gallery in Berlin and Bildhalle Zurich and Amsterdam.