Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery is hosting Omid Delafrouz’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, "Terra Nullius". The show opened on Thursday, 1 October. The Latin title means "nobody’s land"; it can be read literally, but it is also a term in international law used to define the legal status of a territory.

The colonial history behind a legal term

Before it acquired its current judicial usage, the conceptual model of "Terra Nullius" served in the colonial era as an instrument of power, justifying the arbitrary occupation of lands already inhabited — where indigenous peoples were often displaced or exterminated. In the exhibition, Delafrouz delves into modern political history through oil on canvas, his subjects revolving around humanity’s territorial claims on the earth: a violent struggle for dominance of the world that increasingly makes the evolution of intelligent life look like a fatal mutation.

Delafrouz came to Sweden from Iran as a UN quota refugee and grew up in a politically active environment. Political painting and illustration, together with Western classical art and the myths and stories it reflects, formed part of his early childhood. This background is clearly visible in the exhibition, which also reflects on the post-Second-World-War order of the Security Council — the period in which the United Nations and the European Union were established.

From political propaganda imagery to a network of associations

Unlike the political art he grew up with, here the viewer is invited into an associative network of interconnected images, references and contemporary phenomena. Delafrouz deploys a kind of poetic licence, interweaving different images to address modern history and our own era in a broader way.

A representative work, Join, or die (1972, 2026), is an oil on canvas measuring 150 × 150 cm. Its title directly invokes a famous colonial-era North American political cartoon, whose reappearance in a contemporary context itself constitutes a historical echo.

A painter formed within the Swedish art system

Omid Delafrouz was born in 1982 in Tehran, Iran, and now lives and works in Stockholm. He graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2005 and completed his master’s degree at the Valand Academy of the Arts in Gothenburg in 2007. His work has been shown at institutions including Alingsås Konsthall, Eskilstuna Art Museum, Bohuslän Museum and Göteborgs Konsthall.

Set in a wider perspective, Delafrouz represents an important branch of contemporary European painting: artists shaped by migrant and diasporic experience who use the traditional medium of oil painting to tackle grand themes such as colonial history, territory and the international order. SEEEEART will continue to follow the contemporary art scene in the Nordic countries.