With a career that spanned over more than 60 years, artist Lenke Rothman (1929–2008) positioned herself as a pioneering voice in Sweden and abroad. The retrospective exhibition Att hopfoga den sönderfallande världen (Mending a broken world) at the Sörmland Museum presents Lenke Rothman in dialogue with contemporary artist Alina Chaiderov (1984–).

Lenke Rothman grew up in a Jewish Hasidic home in Kiskunfélegyháza, Hungary. In 1944, Lenke Rothman and her family were deported to Auschwitz by the Nazi regime. Before her liberation in Bergen-Belsen 1945, Rothman had survived three concentration camps and lost eight out of her ten family members in the Holocaust. After her liberation, at 16 years of age she arrived to Sweden severely ill with tuberculosis. During her time in sanatoriums, she began what was to become a long and important career within the arts in Sweden.

Lenke Rothman’s life and practice was characterised by an intense preservation of objects, memories and fragments. The exhibition focuses on remembrance and art as a healing process, but also presents the scope of Rothman as a visionary poet.

Memories are passed down through generations, where objects and memories stand in as symbols for lost histories. In this retrospective, Rothman’s practice is also contextualised in relation to contemporary artists, voices and future visions. Alina Chaiderov’s practice represents performative memorialisations, where histories and objects are negotiated and refuse simplifications. The concepts of home and identity are becoming increasingly multifaceted as a consequence of globalisation and migration, despite nationalist movements arguing the opposite.

With memory as material and inner core of the creative process, Russian-Swedish artist Alina Chaiderov creates sculptural works which are intuitively philosophical in their nature. A relationship between the past and present is explored, and inspires works which are at the same time reflective and autobiographical against a backdrop of epochal events in the late 20th century.