Études marginales
for “House of Nisaba”, Moderna Museet Stockholm
14 May—30 August 2026
Photos: Mattias Lindbäck
The sequence of images painted across a continuous 52-metre-long paper strip can be read as a genealogical prelude to the incorporation of puppetry as a fundamental part of Agnes Scherer’s artistic practice. The process of coming to embrace puppetry unfolds in these pictorial narratives through a series of seemingly fateful encounters, through which the adoption and integration of puppetry as a modus operandi for her figurative stagings appears almost as a matter of fate. The scenelike glimpses behind the curtain reveal autofictional details that do not trace a continuous narrative, but bring together unfinished fragments from a stream of sensations and experiences drawn from different threads. Scherer’s engagement with and challenge to traditional gendered role assignments becomes particularly evident in her deployment of the doll maker and puppeteer, a traditionally male-coded demiurgic figure. In the work, this figure emerges as a symbolic gatekeeper, embodying the power to determine who is granted access to the discourse and to the discipline itself.