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On How To Stand in a World on Fire
12 November 2026 – 9 January 2027
Alma Pearl, Unit T, Reliance Wharf, London
The dimensions of the canvases Evelina Hägglund chose are just beyond arm’s length. Their height and width bring the artist to the limits of her body’s reach. While her earlier work circled the unsayable or untranslatable, her recent practice is concerned with the body’s porousness and interconnection with the world. The writer Daisy Hildyard (whom Hägglund cites as an influence) coined the term “the second body” to describe the impact every person has on others and the wider world through their consumption and emissions. If the dimensions of Hägglund’s canvases register the limits of her physical reach, her materials and imagery often allude to the second. In the exhibition ‘On How to Stand in a World on Fire’, each work is both a site where the body and the world meet and a record of this encounter.
The titles of the paintings Woah (2026) and Ahhahahahh (2026) suggest spontaneous expressions of inner feeling. Their febrile lines and calligraphic scrawls of red pigment and graphite point towards the early tremors and subsequent eruptions of intense, unspecified emotion that exceeds language or speech. Clusters form and dissolve, suggesting active and dormant regions in a network or a constellation. In I Feel Everything (2026), this inchoate feeling takes a more coherent form both through the complete sentence of the title and the centred composition. Thick upward strokes of red gather into a dense burst of energy, while at the edges rubbed-out pigment has left behind pale washes of colour, like residual heat. As in Hägglund’s other paintings, the margins of the canvas are left bare, keeping the pictorial space open so it can extend into the surrounding space.
The boundaries between Hägglund’s media are fluid. She previously called her drawings “flat sculptures on canvas” while her wire sculptures can equally be considered drawings in space. In A’ Zhbanngdeghjaaionahohoamlm! and Ldsearaeoooiuuiollllll (both 2021) lengths of rebar are bound together with tie wire, as they would be on a building site. But the skeletons usually embedded in concrete are here left bare, and what they construct, like each work’s title, resolves into nothing recognisable, existing instead somewhere between structure and collapse.
The bust Historical Weight (2026) at first seems to depict a body contained and turned inward, with eyes closed in introspection. Yet its materials and techniques gesture to the 19th century, a time when artists were beginning to capture the dissolving and fragmenting effects of modern life on the self and body. Patinated black, the bust resembles bronze, although it is made of plaster. The bust’s irregular surface retains traces of Hägglund’s hand as well as the individual pieces of material she assembled, rather than concealing them beneath a smooth finish. In the exhibition, Historical Weight is displayed on a stack of books, with more scattered across the floor around it. The head stands on this foundation of ideas, which is already coming apart. The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso argued that we never see an object in isolation, only merged with light and its surroundings.
Carved in limestone, a material associated with monumentality, The Oblivion Seeker (2026) retains the rough, fractured surface of the original stone along its back and sides. The work is titled after a book by the Swiss writer and adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt, who dressed as a man to travel through the Maghreb during the colonial era. It is unclear whether the androgynous face is emerging from the stone or sinking back into it. Does this figure seek oblivion within, as a retreat from the world, or oblivion for the world itself? The work suggests that for a body without firm edges, the two may be one and the same.
In Hägglund’s drawings and paintings, networks and constellations never settle into a fixed pattern. Her sculptures likewise remain open-ended, with each constituent part distinct and visible. If the body is open and porous, then it necessarily exists in relation to something else. Perhaps the answer to the exhibition’s title lies here: one of the ways a person or a structure can stand is through the support of another. In So Much Love (2026), two heads rest against one another, an image of repose as well as communion.
Edmée Lepercq