From feminist outcry to poetic resonance: Åsa Jungnelius at Pera Museum

Åsa Jungnelius's solo exhibition, A Verse, Written with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, curated by Elif Kamışlı, is taking place at the Pera Museum in Istanbul between September 16, 2025, and January 18, 2026. We spoke with Jungnelius on the occasion of the exhibition, which showcases the artist's practice spanning over 20 years

Interview: Merve Akar Akgün

Åsa Jungnelius, Photo: Berk Kır

Åsa Jungnelius, Weapon, 2009

Swedish contemporary artist Åsa Jungnelius presents her solo exhibition A Verse, Written with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air at Pera Museum, Istanbul, running in parallel with the 18th Istanbul Biennial. Spanning more than twenty years of practice since her groundbreaking 2004 graduation show, the exhibition reflects how Jungnelius has transformed glass from a bold feminist outcry into a poetic and philosophical language. For her, glass continues to embody the fragile yet resilient face of modernity while also serving as a medium through which questions of identity, body politics, craft, and collective experience are explored. By merging her training as a glassblower with conceptual depth, Jungnelius crafts works that range from glossy, seductive objects carrying urgent political messages to sculptures shaped by gravity and time itself, revealing how making is inseparable from thinking, and how materiality connects us across history and humanity.

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Åsa Jungnelius, A Verse, Written with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, 2025, Courtesy of Pera Museum

In your graduation show, I like your hairstyle! (2004) glass became a powerful metaphor for female identity, consumer culture, and social codes. What did glass mean to you at that time, and how has its significance evolved today in your solo Pera Museum exhibition A Verse, Written with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air? Does glass still address the fragile yet resilient face of modernity?

I’ll try to answer. The work I showed in my graduation exhibition was, in many ways, my first artwork. I merged my knowledge of glass as a material and a craft with the urgent issues I felt compelled to address. At that time, in the early 2000s, there was a strong feminist movement in Northern Europe, and I felt part of it. It was about independence—the idea that you could be whoever you wanted to be without being limited by gender. Lipsticks, nail polishes, and other stereotypical feminine objects became tools in that search for identity.

The most important aspect, perhaps, was depicting the female gender as a subject rather than an object—someone with rights, independence, and agency. For me, that work was the first door I stepped through into the art world. Glass wasn’t new to me; I had already been trained in it and worked with it as a craftsperson.

Did you study glass at an art academy?

Yes, I did, and I also worked as a glassblower. For me, working with my hands and using materiality as a language has always been central. It’s important for me to hold the tools myself, because the material is the language itself. For me, making is a way of thinking. Humans have always made things, but since the Industrial Revolution, society has shifted—we’ve become consumers instead of makers. For me, making is how I understand my reality, and it also connects me to history, because humans have always made. I Like Your Hairstyle dealt with an urgent feminist question, expressed through my craft skills. It was the first time I combined those two elements that mattered to me.

Left: Åsa Jungnelius, Mother [Breath I], 2025, Blown glass, metal chain, rope, and interlocking hooks, 175x60 cm, Courtesy of the artist. Produced with the support of Şişecam. Right: Åsa Jungnelius, Intense, Warm Core I, 2024, Glass, stainless steel, and Carrara marble, 30x30x165 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Kosta Boda

But does glass still address the fragile yet resilient face of modernity for you, after twenty years?

I would say that nothing stays the same. Everything is always moving, always in process, always becoming. In that work, I used glass for its shiny, glossy qualities—something humans are instinctively drawn to. I created highly polished, desirable objects that almost tricked people into liking them, but behind that shine was a serious feminist and political statement. I made those objects so polished and enticing that it was almost like cheating people into liking them.

Of course, I didn’t want to remain in the same place with the same approach. Over time, I’ve grown with the material. Some of the works I’m showing here in the exhibition are based on a deep trust in the material itself—literally letting it go, allowing gravity to shape it. My vocabulary with glass has widened.

I’ve also embraced its connection to functionality. For many years, I avoided that link, but functionality creates interaction. A glass or vessel immediately tells you to use it; it becomes part of your body, part of space. So now, I also work with functionality as a way of including the viewer directly.

View from Åsa Jungnelius’s exhibition Artifacts: The Origin of Things in Vandalorum, 2019, Sweden Photo: John Nelander

Okay, I see. That’s great. I really appreciate the way you speak about trusting the material. Hearing this from an artist feels refreshing—I don’t think I’ve encountered it put quite like this before. When you say, “I’m trusting this material, glass,” it resonates with me a lot. So you had an exhibition there, Artifacts: The Origin of Things. You combined glass with bone, wood, and fur, creating a dialogue across temporal layers. How do you see this palette of materials sparking mental and emotional associations in the viewer? And is glass here not only a material, but also a stratum of time—because it comes from your past as well?

During that period, I found myself in a very rural area in southern Sweden, a place with long traditions of production—not only glass, but also wood and stone. It’s a landscape shaped by both nature and industry, particularly the forestry industry. I began to question how such a landscape could even be called “nature.” These trees were farmed, planted to become furniture or houses. They weren’t wild. It was a nature that was owned, capitalized—someone was profiting from it.

Living in that landscape, I wanted to understand my relationship to it. Perhaps compost was the only truly circular system left—where you and I eventually rot, become soil, and allow new seeds to grow. If we accept this, we accept that everything is circular, everything takes its time.

I began working outdoors, collecting materials from around my house: old plastic bags, bones, sticks, and paper from an abandoned mill. Gathering what was already there became part of my attempt to understand the site. I also made temporary site-specific works in the landscape.

One of my first gestures in that period was to use violence as a way of connecting with the soil—I blasted a large hole with dynamite. To me, a hole is elastic, it expands and contracts. Creating that hole was a way to open a direct dialogue with the ground itself.

All of this was part of trying to grasp what it meant to live in a landscape so different from the one I grew up in—Stockholm.

Are you still living there?

Yes, I’m still living there. It really put down my roots. Every life crisis I go through becomes material for my work—it pushes me forward. At first, I couldn’t understand this kind of “nature,” because most of it was farmed and owned. Wild places exist only where they’ve been protected, in national parks.

Some of the works that came out of this exploration were shown at Vandalorum, a museum in the region. Actually, there are only two art institutions nearby—Kalmar Art Museum and Vandalorum—and I’ve exhibited in both.

Being based there also led me to start something called Residence in Nature, where I invited artists, curators, and writers to spend time together outdoors. My belief was that we would live and work directly in the material, in the landscape itself.

Earlier, when I was still a student, I was also part of another collaborative project—working in fragile materials with other young artists who were interested in craft and contemporary art. We worked together for a couple of years. So, yes, there were two separate projects, but for me they’re intertwined with nature and my practice.

I’ve always been drawn to collaboration. One of my earliest projects was in Tensta, a suburb of Stockholm, where I worked with the TenstaJulsta Women’s Center. You get to know a place through its people. For me, the most exciting thing is to put myself in situations where I don’t know how it will end. The people, the situation, and the materials present guide the process. That’s how the work continues.

You can even read the landscape like an architecture. Just as you can tell if a house was built in the 18th century or the 1960s, you can read a forest: is it farmed, wild, or converted from farmland? Who has lived there? How old is it? These layers are also part of my learning.

So, if we come to the Pera Museum exhibition: in this exhibition, you collaborated with glassblowers in Denizli at Şişecam. Beyond the technical aspect, did this encounter offer you a new way of thinking about glass? How did the rhythm of their craft influence your imagination? Did this geography reshape your notion of existence-based experience?

It was my wish to go to Denizli, because I knew about the glassmaking tradition there. Glass as a material, and the act of making, are deeply rooted in this region, so I was very curious to see those workplaces. When I arrived, I was welcomed with such warmth, and I was deeply impressed by the way they worked—the quality, the skills, the rhythm of their craft. That was amazing. But most of all, I felt at home. It was such a normal environment for me that I immediately felt included, as if I belonged there.

At the same time, I didn’t know exactly what to do with this meeting. My reaction to being in Denizli was shaped by the sheer energy of the place. There were so many people working together at a very high tempo, producing thin, functional, hand-blown objects. What struck me was how they worked like a single body—ten people moving as one. You use each other’s breath, arms, even feet, and together you create something.

It’s difficult to describe, but it was like witnessing a choreography of making, where everyone’s actions are inseparable from the outcome. One person does this part, another that part, and in the end, perhaps it becomes a simple tea glass. But the process shows how deeply we are all connected—not just through the history of functional objects, but through our shared humanity.

That was how the idea of “collecting breath” emerged. Glass is made with breath, and in Denizli, I saw the breaths of many people being gathered into objects. Transforming those breaths into sculptures became a way for me to express how our souls are connected. Everywhere in the world, we are all the same.

Can we say that it was a collective work, maybe?

Absolutely.

Åsa Jungnelius's work, Shell, designed for the Stockholm Hagastaden metro station The metro station is scheduled to open next year. Photo: Matti Östling

Your hot-air balloon performance Inner Worlds Fair, at Bravallaverken in Norrköping and the Shell installation for the Stockholm Hagastaden metro redefined space and the public encounter. How do these large scale interventions converse with the more intimate yet philosophically charged works now presented at Pera Museum?

In Norrköping, the site was an old industrial harbor with a huge building that once housed an oil plant. The inside had been stripped bare, leaving only an empty shell. For me, it was like a wound of industrialization. Historically, this place also hosted a World Expo a hundred years earlier, at the dawn of industrialization, when the World Expo was a symbol of the future—and the hot-air balloon stood for optimism, a sign of hope.

But when I placed the hot-air balloon inside this industrial ruin, it became trapped. The balloon, once a symbol of freedom and possibility, was now enclosed, unable to escape. For me, this was a metaphor for our society: we share not only progress but also its wounds. We are trapped together in these conditions.

I invited the audience to go on an “inner journey.” People could enter the balloon and experience it moving up and down inside the building. But no matter what, we were all trapped inside together. Alongside this, I created table settings as interactive sculptures—places where people could sit and engage with each other. None of this was planned beforehand. It all came from spending time in the site and letting the place shape the work.

The metro project in Stockholm was completely different. There, I worked closely with architects and engineers as part of a long-term public commission. I conceived the monumental Shell installation as a celebration of motherhood. The project has already taken ten years and is still not finished. Within two years it should be complete.

For this project, I worked with the entire subway station as one artwork. I envisioned the monumental Shell as a passage into a protective form, as if entering a shell itself. The whole station becomes part of the artwork. Everything—from the elevators to the walls—is colored in shades of pink. I designed a huge passage called the Crystal Cave, where you feel as if you are walking into a piece of crystal, though it’s actually made of metal. The scale is enormous.

Some parts are constructed by building companies, while others are freestanding sculptures made in glass or marble. It is both a functioning subway station and a conceptual artwork at the same time. That’s quite a special way of working—maybe the only time I’ll take on something like this.

In your early works, elements such as Snippan lipstick embodied bold feminist symbols of identity and the body. Today, you are writing a kind of poem through the elements in the exhibition. Should we read this as a transformation or as the expansion of the same questions within a wider resonance? How has glass redefined the feminine presentation within traditional craft? 

Yes. I was moving around glass in different ways at that time, but maybe we can still talk about it in this context. As you describe in your question, it is not a rupture but rather a widening. The ingredients are the same—the themes, the concerns, the urgency—but the perspective has expanded.

When I made I Like Your Hairstyle twenty years ago, I was furious. I was angry, and I wanted that anger to be seen and heard. The work was almost like a scream—shouting, “You cannot ignore this!” It was about making visible something that had been silenced, and I wanted to punch through the silence with a loud, unmistakable gesture.

Now, I don’t need to scream in the same way, because I have a platform from which to speak. I don’t need to shout to be heard. With time and with age, my works have grown more layered, more complex. They still reflect my personal experience, because I cannot separate my practice from my own life, but they express that experience in ways that are more open, more nuanced.

In my early works, glass was used to challenge its own history within craft and applied art, reclaiming it as a feminist language. I was inserting the female body, the female experience, into a material that had long been shaped by tradition, function, and masculine-coded mastery. Today, I still use glass in that way, but I allow it to carry more: poetry, spirituality, a wider sense of resonance.

So yes, there is continuity, but also expansion. My works are less about furious declarations and more about weaving personal experience into broader, poetic forms. They are still rooted in feminism, but feminism has also grown with me—less a battle cry, more a way of living, of understanding, of shaping space.

And I also have a question about Elif Kamışlı. The exhibition is curated by her. How did your paths cross, and how did your dialogue shape the ideas, the production, the process, and the display of the exhibition? Do you think your collaboration with Elif Kamışlı contributed to the poetic language of the show?

I feel so lucky to have met Elif. And that happened thanks to Mike Bode, who at the time was the cultural attaché at the Swedish consulate. I received the invitation from the consulate, and it was Mike who introduced us to each other.

Sometimes you meet a person and everything feels easy, natural. That’s how it was with Elif. She showed me around Istanbul, especially the historical parts, and we spent the whole day together, talking. From the very beginning it felt effortless, and we discovered that we shared many interests. From there, the work developed naturally, and all through the process we have had a very beautiful dialogue.

I often say that materiality is my language, that to make is to think. Elif is a writing person. And somehow we met in between those two practices. We share an interest in humanity, in the spiritual dimension of being human, in what it means to exist here, now, in this time and universe. Working with her has been simply beautiful, because she has brought another voice into the exhibition—one that resonates with my own but comes from a different practice.

How lucky! It's really beautiful when it's like that. I have two last questions. You know that your exhibition is a parallel event of the Istanbul Biennial. How do you position yourself within the larger framework of a biennial, where global artistic and political debates unfold? Does this context expand the reach of your practice? Do you care about biennials?

Of course. For me, biennials are very important. As an artist, you are part of an ongoing discussion, and that discussion happens not only through your own practice but through the practices of others as well. A biennial is one of those rare moments when so many artistic voices come together, and the dialogue becomes larger than any single work.

I feel very glad, and honestly lucky, to be making this exhibition at the same time as the Istanbul Biennial. I have visited the biennial before, and I know how significant it is. To be present alongside it, to contribute to that conversation, feels meaningful.

Of course, every biennial has its challenges. This year’s edition feels fragile. There is already a text, there is a theme, but at this stage, before the opening, nobody fully understands what it will look like. We don’t yet know what shape it will take. So there is a kind of uncertainty, a gray zone. But that is also interesting. I am curious, just as you are, to see what will happen when the exhibition finally opens.

For me, the important thing is to contribute my own voice to this broader dialogue. And in that sense, yes, biennials matter. They expand the field of exchange, and they also place your work within a global framework—political, social, artistic—that makes you reflect differently on your own position.

Åsa Jungnelius, A Verse, Written with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, 2025, Courtesy of Pera Museum

From your graduation show to the current presentation at Pera Museum, should we read your practice as a continuity or as a conscious act of rupture and reconstruction? Looking forward, do you envision deepening the philosophical and poetical potential of glass and marble, or are you heading toward entirely new conceptual breaks?

Maybe I don’t fully know the answer myself. But I would say that my practice is something that continues and develops, because it is always based on my own experiences. I see it almost like moving through gates or doors that open when you are searching for something. One door might open toward a deeper understanding of nature. Another might open toward working with marble or stone. Each time, you enter into a new space of knowledge, and that process keeps expanding your practice.

When I began working with stone and marble, for example, it opened up a completely new understanding for me. And I know I will stay with that for a while, because I already have works in progress that I need to finish. I am still very much in love with working with stone. It is slow, it is heavy, it is enduring—and I feel I still have much to learn from it.

So I don’t see my practice as rupture, but as continuity with shifts in material and perspective. Each new material, each new collaboration, each new place is like another threshold. Once you cross it, you are changed, and so is the work.

You have this exhibition now, and the metro station is still ongoing. Do you have other big projects ahead?

Yes. I am currently making a public commission for a city in the north of Sweden. And of course, I have to finish the work for the subway station in Stockholm—that is a very long-term commitment. Beyond that, there are two exhibitions planned in Sweden: one at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and another in a gallery in Gothenburg.

So my schedule is full, but in a way, that is also how I like to work—moving between different scales, from intimate pieces to monumental public works, always carrying the same language of materiality and experience.