Until October 31st, Galerie Nordenhake presents in Stockholm Hendl Helen Mirra’s solo exhibition titled Opålitligt. At first glance, Opålitligt—Swedish for “unreliable”—might seem a curious title for such understated and quietly composed works. But in the context of Hendl Helen Mirra’s long-evolving practice, it signals a welcome unmooring: a relinquishing of control, legibility, and mastery in favour of attention, contingency, and quiet duration.
Hendl Helen Mirra, born in Rochester, New York, in 1970 and lives near the Pacific coast in California, presents a new body of work shaped by her recent shift away from weaving after working with tapestry for nine years, and toward open-ended forms of attention, seeking a departure from the precision of detail and a return to not-knowing. What remains is a quiet attentiveness to daily experience and a continued engagement with aimless walking. Some of the works in the exhibition index walking directly. They are reverse “replicas” of irregular trail signs from the Sierra Nevada mountains—wooden markers that suggest a liberatory situation: being simultaneously behind the signifier and in a place beyond naming, beyond the signified.
Other works include vertical wooden planks that lean against the wall, each featuring a calligraphy of two turning words drawn on thin paper, mounted as veneer. These were made by writing simultaneously with both hands—one forward, one backward—arms outstretched, using ink brushes. The writing is in cursive and deliberately not neat, resembling seaweed in appearance. The artist refers to them as peripheral calligraphies, combining visual lightness with the physical weight of their materials, capturing traces of breathing and easeful attention. Also included are two readymade objects. One is a fragment of a wooden ruler found on a slope in South Tyrol; the other is a green-painted bar of wood found in a scrap pile at Waldau, the psychiatric clinic near Bern where writer Robert Walser once lived. Though visual in form, Mirra states that these works are not about seeing. Instead, they signal a sensorial mode of being—an ongoing, temporary life, emplaced peacefully and without names.
For more information, please consult Galerie Nordenhake’s website here.
Last Updated on October 14, 2025
- Published on
About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
