Pia Rönicke and Johan Tirén

Pia Rönicke

Photographer: Hendrik Zeitler
Photographer: Hendrik Zeitler
Photographer: Hendrik Zeitler

Pia Rönicke participated in the residency Between the Rains 2022 and returns to Laholm and Teckningsmuseet in 2025 in collaboration with Johan Tirén to present drawings, installations and videos.

I am searching for what doesn’t exist, 2025

Video, drawing, mixed media

The starting point for our work is the river Lagan, where the river pearl mussel is about to go extinct, and salmon and trout can no longer migrate upstream due to the many hydroelectric plants that today regulate the water flow.

In the work I am searching for things that don’t exist, which consists of drawings, video installation and material collected from Lagan, we make a journey along the river – from the mouth at Kattegatt to the source south of Jönköping. Together we follow the movement of the water through landscapes characterized by the slowness of nature, but also by human intervention. On the way, we pass dams and power plants that stop the migration of fish and fundamentally change ecosystems.

With Lagan as a geographical and symbolic vein, we look at the vulnerable ecological cycles threatened by regulation, industrial needs and the loss of biodiversity. In one of the video works, we meet Per Ingvarsson, a water engineer and committed restorer of water ecosystems. He talks about a threatened living space, but also about a resistance – a dedication to understand and protect. The river pearl mussels that still remain in Lagan are all over 100 years old. Together with them, the knowledge of their environment risks disappearing. Through Ingvarsson´s story, the work raises questions about time, responsibility and what it means to care for a place.

I am searching for what doesn’t exist, becomes an attempt to listen – to the water, the landscape, the history and the future.

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Pia Rönicke (b. 1974) works with film, prints, sculptures and objects and lives and works in Denmark. In her works, plant life transcends existing lines of occupation and in a stateless perspective, decolonial strategies open up new connections to land and territorial understanding. Recurring in her practice is collecting on different levels, personal, ethical and political, and picking and preserving plants between newspaper pages. Pia Rönicke was an artist in residence through Art Inside Out in Laholm 2022.

For more information about Pia Rönicke’s work during the residency in Laholm 2022, see the page for the residency Between the Rains.

Johan Tirén (b. 1973) is a visual artist and curator, based in Stockholm. He is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1998–2003) and Malmö Academy of Fine Arts (2003-2004). He works with various media – from drawings, posters and prints to video. In recent years, Tirén’s work has largely moved in public space – from self-initiated investigations of urban environments, mapping of the colors of nature, to permanent artistic creations.