Michella Bredahl

Rooms We Made Safe is the up-and-coming Danish artist Michella Bredahl's first major solo exhibition in the Nordic countries. Bredahl is known for her extremely intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances, whom she depicts in their homes in private moments. But a home is not necessarily a safe place. Based on a deeply personal narrative, the exhibition reaches back to photographs Bredahl's mother took before her birth and to the images they later created together during the artist's upbringing. The exhibition presents 70 photo and film works.

Bredahl grew up in a public housing complex on the outskirts of Copenhagen with her single mother and younger sister. The apartment was characterized by a strong and vibrant color palette that contrasted with the prevailing minimalist Scandinavian ideal of the time. Each room had its own distinct color: deep blue, burgundy, and floral patterns unfolding on the walls. When Bredahl was seven years old, her mother gave her her camera. Thereafter, they together documented their close and intimate everyday life. Already as children, the two sisters were confronted with their mother's addiction, which left deep imprints on them. In Rooms We Made Safe, Bredahl returns to the rooms of her childhood, which at the time were a dangerous place, and transforms them into a strong artistic expression. Each exhibition room is dedicated to different periods in her practice and serves as a tribute to her mother and their shared documentation of the domestic sphere.

A Study of Femininity Shortly after completing her studies, Bredahl began traveling regularly to Paris, where she eventually settled in 2020. The city offered the warmer tones she had sought, and also a rich cultural diversity. Here Bredahl began photographing people from her close circle: friends, friends' children, and artists from her own environment. The portraits bear witness to an attraction to people who share a form of femininity – an expression and experiential space she does not perceive as fixed or unambiguous, but as fluid, multifaceted, and shaped by the individual. Bredahl photographs her models in their own homes, thereby evoking a deeply personal atmosphere, which is enhanced by the depth and rich colors of the analogue images. A larger selection of her portraits was collected in her first monograph Love Me Again (Loose Joints Publishing, 2023), which became a crucial turning point in her career and attracted international attention in the art world.

Pole Dance While working on her graduation film Chassé (2019), which follows a group of dancers, Michella Bredahl became friends with one of the pole dancers from the film. They began taking dance lessons together, and this became the starting point for Bredahl's investigation of pole dance, both on a personal level and through the camera. She is fascinated by the enormous physical strength required by the complex movements, but also by the dancers' liberating self-confidence in the otherwise vulnerable situation of being undressed. Many of the pole dancers practice dance in their own home environments. Their graceful movements are primarily directed inward towards themselves: it is about being present in one's own body and feeling beautiful. Sometimes the dance can also be intended for a partner's gaze. For Bredahl, dance is the artistic expression that comes closest to photography: both are about a feeling of release, freedom, and being fully present here and now. The dance motif is a natural extension of Bredahl's artistic interest in the intimate and the domestic. The photographs that have come out of the work celebrate the strength of the female body.

Miu Miu In Paris, Michella Bredahl became part of a vibrant cultural scene, and it was there that she first met the acclaimed stylist Lotta Volkova. Based on Volkova's role as styling consultant for Miu Miu (a fashion house founded by Prada), they decided to collaborate on this series of images of pole dancers, photographed in their homes or studios around Paris and styled in clothes from Miu Miu's Autumn/Winter 2024 collection. As in much of her other work, Bredahl lets her friends and people from her circle take on the main roles in these narratives. The portraits contain a number of captivating contrasts. The sometimes cluttered, private interiors stand in stark contrast to the dancers' elegant poses. The clothes add another layer: they both challenge the tendency to equate pole dance with striptease and at the same time make the dance physically more demanding, as bare skin is usually necessary to grip the pole. The series was later published as a book, and since then Bredahl and Volkova have continued their creative collaboration, including an advertising campaign for Miu Miu Upcycled 2025.

Mothers and Daughters One of the central themes of the exhibition is the beauty and complexity embedded in the mother-daughter relationship. By including photographs from her own family archive, Bredahl brings her own history and earliest artistic starting point into the exhibition. Images of her mother from the 1970s and early 1980s add a historical dimension to the portrayal of expressions of femininity and self-representation, showing how the urge to express oneself creatively has been passed down from mother to daughter. Raw photographs from the 1990s show a mother caught in an addiction, seen through a child's eyes. They provide an honest insight into a family life with particular, complex challenges and joys – a story that only a child who has lived through it can fully understand.

About Michella Bredahl Michella Bredahl studied photography at Fatamorgana, Denmark's Photographic Art School (2010–2011), and later completed the documentary director's program at The Danish Film School (2015–2019). in 2023, she published her first monograph, Love Me Again, with Loose Joints Publishing. Over the past two years, her intimate approach to portraiture has garnered international attention for her as a significant new voice, including in The Guardian; this was followed by several major commissions and the exhibition Unmade Beds in the project space Shoot the Lobster (2023, New York). The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Rooms We Made Safe by Michella Bredahl with a text by Stephanie LaCava and is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Rooms We Made Safe is Bredahl's first major solo exhibition at a museum in the Nordic countries.

The exhibition has been developed in collaboration between Kunstmuseum Brandts and Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, where the exhibition started in October 2025, and The Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle in Hillerød, where the exhibition will travel to in September 2026.

The artist wishes to thank:

Statens Kunstfond Dansk Tennis Fond Fake Foundation Poul Johansen Fonden