6.2.—1.3.2026, Photographic Gallery Hippolyte

Girl, Battle is a long-term, multi-chapter project by Sofia Runarsdotter. The project stems from Runarsdotter’s own experiences as a committed handball athlete in her adolescence. In her work, she has engaged a team of young female handball athletes in a rural mill town in northern Sweden. Runarsdotter’s interest in them lies in observing the dynamics of team sport at a crucial age—between childhood and adulthood. How is girlhood shaped through such collective experience in relation to achievement, pressure, intimacy, and violence?

Handball is often perceived by the general public as a jovial and communal team sport. However, as a high-impact sport with an explosive, combative nature, it involves one of the highest rates of injury among Olympic sports—specifically injuries that can lead to permanent complications or discomfort for women. Runarsdotter remembers how the players collided into each other without any protection.

Girl, Battle departs from a personal perspective of Runarsdotter revisiting not only the sport and its members, but also the location from her youth, with the eyes of an artist and adult. Runarsdotter left the sport at seventeen, at her physical peak. As a result of the high pressure, her body collapsed due to overtraining syndrome. It took her years to recover. She did not return to the sports hall until now—twenty years later.

The project also explores the darker shadows of the artist’s memories and the ambiguity inherent in silent violence and its accompanying closeness—conflicting forces that strongly shaped an entire world. Through workshops with the young athletes, the photographs were staged in a tentative collaboration. By reducing the light to bursts of flash, Runarsdotter freezes moments of contact, attack and defence, dedication and euphoria, forming a choreography of intense, isolated movements. To highlight both the beauty and the struggle within handball—and to pay tribute to an ordinary team sport without men—she uses analogue techniques to evoke the physicality, surface, and pictorial intensity of Baroque paintings.

Sofia Runarsdotter (b.1982, Robertsfors, Sweden) has a twenty-year practice as a documentary photographer in Sweden and abroad, with clients including New York Times and Dagens Nyheter, and as a cinemaphotographer for the Swedish Public Television documentary department. She holds a master’s in fine art from Konstfack University of Arts and Craft and has studied at the Royal Institute of Art and Nordens Fotoskola (Stockholm). Runarsdotter develops socially engaged, autobiographically informed projects shaped by her isolated upbringing in rural northern Sweden, exploring environments, contradictions, and layered narratives through themes such as the body’s brilliance and decline, violence, identity, and class. In 2023, Runarsdotter received the Vera and Gösta Agnekil Scholarship, and in 2024 was nominated for the international Women Photography Grant by PHmuseum. She also edits the northern Swedish minority-language magazine Provins and teaches Storytelling through Photography at DIS – Study Abroad in Stockholm.

Girl, Battle’s first chapter, Girl, Unboxed (2022), was developed in dialogue with the curator and artistic director Ashik Zaman.

The exhibition and artist’s work is supported by Kulturfonden för Sverige och Finland, Konstnärsnämnden (The Swedish Arts Committee) and Letterstedtska föreningen.