Exhibit Opening: Emelie Röndahl and Nordic Echoes

Experience the opening of ASI’s latest exhibits, featuring works by fiber artist Emelie Röndahl and 24 folk artists from the Upper Midwest. In Röndahl’s Handwoven: Between Chaos and Order, visitors will experience vibrant sensory textile works using rya, a traditional Scandinavian weaving technique, to create contemporary figurative works that balance chaos and order. Also on display will be Nordic Echoes: Tradition in Contemporary Art, a large traveling collection featuring 24 folk artists of the Upper Midwest. FIKA Café will serve light fare and drinks for purchase.

Handwoven: Between Chaos and Order
Emelie Röndahl creates large-scale figurative textiles that challenge and expand the possibilities of rya, a traditional Scandinavian weaving technique. Based in Falkenberg, Sweden, Röndahl holds a PhD in Fine Arts Crafts from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, where her research explored the contemporary potential of rya weaving. Her work spans textiles, sculpture, and moving image, often addressing themes of the body, identity, and self-perception.

As a textile artist, Emelie challenges tradition by showcasing new aspects of rya, creating depth and duality in her works, which can be viewed from both sides to tell a deeper story. Her large, woven pieces can be unclear at first, but they reveal themselves upon closer examination. Her works ask viewers to slow down and look closely. Instead of trimming the excess threads, she intentionally lets them hang, where they appear to be “crying.”

“A rya is constantly trembling between chaos and order, crying and bleeding yarn, where the built-in two-sidedness is well suited to figurative motifs because it then reinforces an underground or ‘back’ of a motif.” – Emelie Röndahl

On view throughout the Turnblad Mansion, visitors will encounter more than 20 of Röndahl’s handwoven works, including two moving-image pieces and a newly commissioned self-portrait. Video documentation of her weaving process provides further insight into the evolution of her subjects, which range from internet imagery to world events to intimate depictions of family, pets, and her own body.

Nordic Echoes: Tradition in Contemporary Art
View the traveling exhibition of contemporary Nordic folk arts and cultural traditions from the American region, curated by the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Nordic Echoes: Tradition in Contemporary Art features 44 works by 24 artists from the Upper Midwest, including Tia Keobaunpheng, Christine Novotny, John Frandy, Talon Cavender-Wilson, Mike Loeffler, and more.

Highlighting innovations to and variations on traditions, this exhibit presents artists’ works as living, malleable forms grounded in traditional skills rather than as static objects rooted in the imagined past. Through mixed media works–including wood, textile, clay, and metal–the exhibition challenges the dominant “heritage model” of ethnic folklore by emphasizing that “all tradition is change.”