A Time for Everything Opens at Scandinavia House: Nordic Art in Dialogue with New York
There is a joy and a pain in it—humor and quiet anguish. I’m with curator Emily Stoddart at Scandinavia House, gazing down at Olof Marsja’s floor piece, “The Baggage.” It’s less than twenty-four hours before “A Time for Everything” opens, and she has carved out a few minutes to walk me through the show. I arrived with no background on Scandinavian culture outside of what IKEA has shown me.
From the doorway, I did what I always do: look around, get judgy. Gears—fine, mechanical perfection. A crashing wave—sure, the North Sea is a mood. Then, across the room, spindly bodies with glossy heads, black hands, and a bright IKEA bag on a hot pink tether. I could hear my mom: “I could make that out of pipe cleaners.” My blue-collar dad: “Sixties modernist hogwash.” I braced for another sermon about consumerism eating nature and stepped inside.
We started with The Icelandic Love Corporation—Jóní Jónsdóttir and Eirún Sigurðardóttir—who take us through the Icelandic Symphony’s old instruments via a psychedelic lens. Images, light, and sound collide until it feels like you are completely lost and completely found at the same time.
We then moved to “Events Taking Place Outside” by Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir. It’s two-dimensional, funny, horrible—a perfect example of contemporary surrealism: a terrier in a bomb vest offers cream for your bitter coffee. Relief and dread share a cup. Do I need the mass-produced cigarette, or to watch a real one out in nature? Does it matter which? Do I actually have a choice?
Turning around, we enjoy the life-sized installation by Shoplifter/Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir. It’s chaotic but contained. Hair—synthetic and human—is sculpted into hand-blown glass forms or nested inside fused found glass, stacked into biomorphic towers. Mirrors double everything; fields of colored sand quietly “paint” the floor and the reflections on the ceiling. It’s theatrical, tactile. Alive.
Next, we move to the calm “Glacial Landscape #14” by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson. It pulls me into stillness, like a dream or a memory I once knew but have now forgotten. Jónsson’s process—laying silk threads across the studio, painting an image onto the loose warp, then weaving it all together—creates beautiful, disjointed landscapes both foreign and familiar.
Context matters. “A Time for Everything” opens the institution’s twenty-fifth anniversary with thirty contemporary artists in real conversation with New York. The point is range; “Nordic” means many things to many people. Paint, handcraft, ceramics, silverwork, carving, porcelain, paper—separate yet unified. With several works on view for the first time ever, we become part of the new works inspired by New York and Scandinavia, right here, right now, together.
I finally make my way to Marsja’s “stick figures,” which aren’t stick figures at all. Their feet are carved with a soft, blocky elegance. The heads—beautiful but faceless flowers—are emotive in their stillness. The organically stark black glaze covering them feels both luxurious and putrid. I, unfortunately, still thought: clever, whimsical, capitalism meme. Then I got to the bag.
No trash. No plastic. Inside were fragments of Sámi life: reindeer antlers, carved wood, an embroidered belt, brightly worked silver. The IKEA blue—the representation of what I knew to be Scandinavian—was cradling its true inheritance. The piece suddenly snapped into focus for me. Stoddart explains how Marsja built this flower-headed character after picking wildflowers with his young daughter above the Arctic Circle. The flower represents a new species to be found in the future; the glaze carries that excitement edged with distress. The blooms he picks will only last so long up there now that the earth is warming, and he does not know what kind of world his daughter will inherit. The bag is literal baggage—identity, memory, responsibility—hauled forward, not discarded. The figures aren’t crushed; they’re upright. Moving. Proud. Looking toward an unknown future with hope.
That landed in my chest. I’m a Brazilian-American who grew up in the Southwest. I carry my own baggage of languages, foods, and jokes that don’t translate. I’ve learned my heritage through a screen of pride, shame, foggy memories, and distance. New York is full of people like that—hyphenated, braided, wheeling your history through a turnstile and then having to go to work because it’s Tuesday. “The Baggage” names that space without scolding: don’t choose between selves; carry them—they are you, and you are now.
Stoddart has curated this exhibition at that frequency. The title reads like a historical catalyst—that moment between eras, between certainties. We’re living in one massive burst right now: climate, tech, the question of what even counts as real; we feel it building toward something big. So, what do we do? How do we move forward? Who are we to try? The show answers with tenderness and quiet labor. Blow the glass. Tie the knots. Weave the waterfall until pixels turn back into thread. Pin a balloon to the ceiling and let the room grin. Take your heritage with you, even if you only have a bag to carry it in—and then move.
On my way out, I apologized to Marsja in my head for the pipe-cleaner slander. I arrived ready to be lectured; I left steadier—seen by a work that understands how heavy, and how necessary, it is to carry who we are. “A Time for Everything” doesn’t cancel the idea of being “Nordic”; it complicates it. You can love clean lines and naked wood and still haul messy stories, deep emotion, grave uncertainty—with joy. You can mourn and move. You can keep what made you without letting it grind you down. In this city, that’s both a challenge and permission. Go see the show; it’s one you won’t want to miss.
By @alinagatrell for @tawkofnewyawk • A Time for Everything @scandinaviahouse
Curated by Emily Stoddart; organized by The American-Scandinavian Foundation.
Oct 18, 2025–Feb 14, 2026 • 58 Park Ave • Tue–Sat 12–6, Wed till 7
Details, tours & talks: link in bio
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