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Magnificent Desolation 
Susanna Marcus Jablonski with Eva Maria Benavente Dahlin
skēnē
14.3–11.4.2026

Readings 14 and 21 March, 11 April


skēnē is proud to present Magnificent Desolation, an exhibition by artist Susanna Marcus Jablonski in collaboration with playwright Eva Maria Benavente Dahlin.

Magnificent Desolation unfolds in two entwined parts — a performance within a staged spatial environment—where language, image, and topography converge.

The exhibition reflects an expansion of Susanna Marcus Jablonski’s sculptural practice, where “sculpture” is not only located in discrete objects but also in the conditions that host the convening of objects and bodies in physical space.

On several occasions, a script written together with Eva Maria Benavente Dahlin will be read by different voices — an assembly that carries the narrative forward, gathering it and dispersing it again.

The script centres on a drawing made in the 1940s by an imprisoned child that depicts the Earth as seen from the Moon. It traces the  drawing’s afterlife as it outlives its maker and becomes entangled in histories of displacement, technological ambition and cultural memory, resonating across multiple temporalities and geographies. Acting as a sculptural force, the drawing carries histories beyond what can be physically present.

Fragments of the gallery’s original tiled floor reappear as sculptural elements—effigies of the surface that already exists beneath our feet, where traces of the building’s history meet the exhibition’s spatial narrative and the presence of those who gather within it.

These gestures engage directly with the architecture of Eric Sigfrid Persson’s Malmgården, completed in 1935 and shaped by a humanistically inflected functionalism. Conceived at a historical threshold, the building embodies the atmosphere of a modernist promise that plays out in the shadow of the approaching war.

Both text and installation function as a form of scaffolding, considering how objects and spaces hold sedimented histories, and how sculptural form remains in active negotiation with time, memory, and material change.

– Karin Bähler Laver


The exhibition made in support by Byggfabriken, Kulturrådet,
Malmö Stad, Region Skåne and The Swedish Art Grants Comittee.

Readings by Måns Lagerlöf, Lena Strömberg Lagerlöf, Eva Maria Benavente Dahlin,Susanna Marcus Jablonski, Karin Bähler Laver, Santiago Mostyn, Hanni Kamaly, Bereket Hailemariam.