Maritea Dæhlin is an artist who works across the spectrum of theatre, photography, video, performance, sound and text. Through fragmentation, repetition and rhythm, she creates ritual and visually striking spaces in which she poses questions about identity, history and tradition.

Dæhlin is a third-generation artist: daughter of visual artist Gitte Dæhlin (1956–2012) and granddaughter of ceramicist Lisbet Dæhlin (1922–2012). When both of her foremothers passed away in the same year, she suddenly found herself in the role of steward of their artistic legacy. It’s hard to imagine the scale and weight of this task: not only the handling of a material bequest, but also the responsibility of managing their artistic legacy into the future.

For the exhibition Passing Motherhood, Dæhlin produces a new cycle of work in dialogue with the artistic practices of her mother and grandmother. She brings her body and voice to the fore, orchestrating the co-presence of her children, along with sculptures made by Gitte and Lisbet, into the works. It manifests a shift of medium in Dæhlin’s practice and is the first photographic work made by the artist. These new works are shown in this exhibition within the exhibition, together with Gitte Dæhlin’s Taken by the Game and a gold cup made by Lisbet Dæhlin.

Using herself and her own body as her material, Dæhlin has long worked with performance, a format that requires her presence in real time. After becoming a mother herself, the need arose to broaden the performance into other media such as sound, text, video and photography — expressions that can ‘perform’ without her actually being physically present in the work. This transition allows her to continue to explore identity, heritage and belonging, while still allowing her the opportunity to be present for her family.

In the exhibition, she posits her art practice within both her mother and grandmother’s material. The new work, This is a blue jug (2025), combines archive footage of her grandmother’s hands, turning clay, with a fictionalized conversation between Maritea, her grandmother and her grandfather, art historian Erik Dæhlin. The video reflects a child’s wondering gaze upon art. In the text HANDS, reproduced in the catalogue, Dæhlin imagines an afterlife conversation with her mother: a seemingly mundane chat that nevertheless touches on big questions about choices, personal costs and what it means to be an artist and a parent.

The photographs shown in Passing Motherhood, including Great Grandmother’s Dance, depict Dæhlin with her daughter Nina, both with painted faces, holding one of her grandmother/great-grandmother’s signature blue jugs. The face painting occupies a liminal space between children’s play and ritual masking; an echo of Gitte Dæhlin’s sculptures in which faces often appear as mask-like forms. Other photographs show Maritea wearing a leopard print, posing with various objects from her mother and grandmother’s bodies of work: papier-mâché and textile sculptures, as well as ceramics, including a gold cup that Dæhlin uses daily. The leopard pattern is omnipresent, challenges the viewer, and can be interpreted both as a superficial consumer product and an animal mask. It is a transgression of human and animal boundaries that echoes something similar in Gitte Dæhlin’s sculptures, and it is a recurring theme in Maritea’s work.

Through the new body of work, Maritea Dæhlin weaves together experiences and idioms of several generations, across continents and art forms. The works reflect how she takes ownership of her own identity and history, while at the same time bringing the heritage of her familial foremothers into a new artistic landscape. The result is an expanded self-portrait, with an emphasis on the expansion of the concept of the “self”; an exploration of identity that is in living dialogue with parents, children, and the ritual space between present and past.

-            Marianne Zamecznik