Image: Hugo Mugerwa Klockars
Southnords UPNEXT 2026 winner
Southnord is proud to present the UPNEXT 2026 exhibition Surfacing with this year's winner Hugo Mugerwa Klockars (b.2003, Sweden). Working in large scale multi-medium installations, he examines tenderness, fragility, impermanence, memory, and how the body responds when encountering something vulnerable or difficult to hold onto. This year’s show is curated by Sarah Tawiah Svärd.
Hugo is currently studying at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. When he sews together images, books, and collages, it often feels as though he is seeing the work a new, as if the act of mending allows something hidden to surface.
Working slowly by hand, giving each millimeter his full attention, becomes an act of care and presence. Sewing is, for him, a way of processing and healing almost as if he were stitching together a wounded body. Through these gestures of mending and assembling, he explores how vulnerability can exist alongside strength, and how care itself can become a form of resistance against erasure of Black interiority.
