May 29 – September 28 2025
The powerful artist from Stockholm who, in both words and courage, flexes her muscles for the silent voices.
Kakan Hermansson grew up in Lund but now lives and works in Stockholm. In addition to her artistic career, Hermansson is known as a TV show host, writer and social debater. She runs the podcast Under Huden (under the skin) and the skincare brand Maggie by Kakan.
A hallmark of Hermansson is that she uses words and courage to fight for those who do not dare, have the strength or simply can’t. Solidarity and anti-racism are in her backbone and she persistently uses her public voice to raise opinion.
In Hermansson’s role as an artist, she has always started from some kind of power analysis, regardless of whether it was about men’s violence against women, hate crimes or old social construct. Violence, power, sexuality and aesthetic values have been the basis for everything she has worked with. It has rarely been particularly joyful or fun to delve into the darkest depths, says Hermansson, but according to her it is necessary in her artistic career. Gradually, her art has come to deal with other subjects and take on other expressions, even though the core is always more or less the same.
In recent years, Hermansson has moved further into the Home, studying the public home and delving into the foundations of the public home’s objects and senders. Her previous perspective (violence, death, objects, status) feels like a natural extension of finding answers and placing herself in history and context. By twisting and turning the feeling of status, and analyzing what is what, she has found a home in pots, vases and dishes. She often finds answers in questions about gender and class connected to the home’s decoration and kitchen, other women’s everyday lives and hands.
From always working very theoretically and calculatingly, Hermansson now finds herself in the middle of writing new history, and placing herself in a new tradition of building and pottery. Is she the new Signe Persson Melin? No, of course not, but she is probably there in her, in her paws from time to time.
In Hermansson’s exhibition Heavy Action at the Gamla Kraftstationen, she shows ceramics and textile works.
Instagram: @rnbhermansson
