Ida Rödén
The Lost Archive of Falck and Brandt

In this exhibition, the artist Ida Rödén presents two fictional eighteenth-century naturalists named Jonas Falck and Jon Brandt. Using a mix of drawings, notes, and objects inspired by natural history, Rödén creates a hypothetical world that explores how knowledge is produced, documented, and remembered.

The eighteenth century was a time when the world was being mapped, collected, and named like never before. Naturalists traveled across continents, describing new species and amassing collections of plants, animals, fossils, and minerals.

But not everything could be ordered in such a way.

Some things were simply unclassifiable. Other things were neglected, forgotten, or left unnamed.
The exhibition The Lost Archive of Falck and Brandt takes its cue from real locations, actual discoveries, scientific theories, and documented observations.

But there is more to the story:

As portrayed here, Jonas Falck is a self-taught naturalist and a rejected apprentice of the great Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus. During his expeditions, Falck collects animals, fossils, and traces of long-extinct species. His notes describe anatomical aberrations and fossils that cannot be classified within the accepted taxonomies of natural history.

As for Jon Brandt, he – or rather she – is in fact Joanna Brandt, who has disguised herself as a man in order to take part in polar expeditions. During these expeditions, Brandt uses a sounding line to study the still-unknown landscapes of the ocean floor that are hidden beneath the ice.
The exhibition presents some of the material Falck and Brandt left behind, as reconstructed by the artist Ida Rödén.

Ida Rödén (b. 1981, Härnösand, Sweden) is a Stockholm-based artist. Her practice straddles the line between fantasy, history, and scientific observation. Her works often take the form of fictional archives and dialogues with imagined historical figures, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
Rödén holds an MFA degree from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and a BFA from Umeå Art Academy. Her art has been shown both in Sweden and internationally. In 2023 she took part in the ARTofMELT polar research expedition aboard the icebreaker Oden. She also works as an editor for the art journal Volym and as a curator in Stockholm.
The present exhibition is a collaboration with IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s international program for visual and applied arts.