For her first exhibition in Denmark, Fatima Moallim engages with Galleri Susanne Ottesen as a studio space, a performance space, and an exhibition space. Working on-site and in dialogue with her surroundings, Moallim reveals a process usually hidden from view, joining a lineage of artists who have inhabited the gallery since its founding in Gothersgade in 1989.
On Monday 20 October, Fatima Moallim relocates her studio and starts working on Manuals. As her artistic process begins, so too does the exhibition. While the artist has continuous access to the gallery, visitors are invited to experience the exhibition during regular opening hours. On Wednesday 12 November, we will host a reception marking the laying down of tools and completion of the works. The show will remain on view through Saturday 15 November.
Through active engagement with her environment – its textures, scale, and soundscape – Moallim fluidly transforms materials into sketches, complete or unresolved. She pins paper, canvas, or linoleum to the walls and draws rapidly, often across multiple surfaces at once. These living compositions remain in the gallery, shifting across the space as the exhibition evolves.
Born in 1992 in Moscow to Somali parents, raised in Växjö and living and working in Malmö, Moallim’s self-taught practice is shaped by her layered experience of place and belonging. Her forms of expression connect personal memories with the immediate experience of her environment. This nostalgia is encoded in her choice of materials: the ballpoint pens that she often uses recall doodling in the margins of school books, whilst drawing on linoleum evokes the floors of her childhood home.
Her gestural works resist rigid categorisation but convey a deep psychological charge. Repetitive lines and shapes form an alphabet of stillness and motion, tension and release, like manuals for an enigmatic choreography. At times, the artist presses down so hard that her tools jam or puncture the paper; her fingers digging into the surface until sign and action are blurred.
Visitors encounter a multi-sensory unfolding of her practice, where beginning and end, process and finished product, are blurred. The rich scent of oil stick and the audible scratch of graphite accompany the visual progression of Moallim's work. Dramatic variations in scale, from intimate sketches to expressive compositions that stretch toward the tall ceilings, envelop the gallery in her distinctive language.
To witness the exhibition is to step into an evolving story of both the artist’s practice and that of the gallery, at a time when the wider art ecosystem is experiencing a crucial period of change.
Kilde:
Galleri Susanne Ottesen
Galleri Susanne Ottesen
