Harder Better Faster Stronger
Updated: 8 hours ago
Harder Better Faster Stronger – Are Men OK?
Fotografiska, Stockholm
October 3, 2026 – October 7, 2027
Harder Better Faster Stronger – Are Men OK? at Fotografiska in Stockholm is the kind of exhibition that is exceptionally hard to get right under today’s sometimes overperceptive eye, where the court of public opinion is quick to pass judgment, nitpicking wherever fodder for a particular stance can be found. With that logic, it is also very easy to get it wrong even when you’re right, or rather your intentions are, albeit not entirely without fault. As a critic, your words can only be unfailingly glowing in the case of an exhibition like this if you’re predisposed to please and not offend, or if you believe its merits should allow you some lenience with the rest.
The subtitle and the additional strand of inquiry (Are Men OK?) call for an expectation of being served more food for thought through the various selected outputs of the artists, beyond mere illustration. Are men ok? The question alone begs a few more from the outset. How many “blueprint projects” like Sam Taylor-Johnson’s iconic series of crying men starring well-known actors do you need to answer it? And shouldn't you in 2026 move beyond stock images and tropes of men in the army and navy, and collegiate super-athletes in wrestling singlets, to express how many have had to, and still have to, compartmentalize their innate vulnerability behind a hard exterior programmed for the hegemonic trifecta: protect, fight and conquer?
I’m a curator and critic about whom witty students at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm once made a meme, declaring the baseline for being liked by me as an artist is making that wrestling singlet image. I also subsequently curated a wrestling exhibition in three chapters, specifically and consciously moving away from the documentary lens that presupposes a role as fly on the wall (skin) on the coming-of-age wrestler, with titillating effect. I get the display of Ashley Markle’s Gutwrench and can fully absorb it. Once I realize it’s not actually Collier Schorr’s The Wrestler series but rather a close kin and descendant, I do find, while navigating the various sections of the exhibition, that these images make for among the instantly, visually most commanding on any of the walls.
I appreciate how it strikes me as evident that the curators, Johan Vikner and Sofia Liljergren, have wished to adopt a culturally intersectional approach deviating from Western-world blind spots, without, for that sake, resorting to a mundane around-the-world 360-degree strategy. Yet, I genuinely am not sure what the curators themselves make out of, or what they believe we as the audience should make out of seeing as many as two, three, or four apparently identical series by different artists. These illustrate men in their most unadorned, mundane habitat: at work, in blue-collar jobs, or at home with their children as caretakers in the domestic sphere. Illustrating a facet of being a man, being an individual at all in quotidian society, yes; and perhaps hinting at a correlation between the advancing of softer masculinities and men’s early and equitable participation in child-rearing?
The exhibition is set off right off the bat by a very specific tone that either is a tongue-in-cheek statement on how exhibitions like these have historically been presented from a Western bias, one that is meant to be nuanced in the subsequent unrolling of what awaits, or just actually perpetuates the same. I do personally find some humour in pairing two striking portraits by Herb Ritts of two Hollywood icons who, more than many others, have permeated pop culture with “a face” of white American corn-fed wholesomeness: Richard Gere and Matthew McConaughey. Seeing these portraits from the same vantage point as Brianna Jones’ series Herndon Monument Climb, with Jones emphasizing Bruce Weber-esque, chiselled alabaster bodies of American navy men while at play in a laborious ritual, at least seemingly seems to cement something. Whether unintentionally or not. That isn’t to say there aren’t conventionally attractive normative BIPOC bodies presented in the exhibition that correspond to desire and exude it. Which, I would stress, should not be confused with images like Weber’s (now controversial) work for Abercrombie & Fitch, which, in keeping with the artistic intention, was designed to shape the gaze on idealized human demigods.
That brings me to the one international superstar in the exhibition, Paul Mpagi Sepuya.
“The photographers I have long been calling for are achieving success, including Tyler Mitchell, John Edmonds, and Clifford Prince King. The Black photographers Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Deana Lawson, who work with a kind of meta-photography foregrounding the Black body and Black social imaginaries, respectively, are certainly among the ‘hottest’ contemporary photographers right now, yet neither of them has exhibited in Sweden. I try to think of art spaces near me that might conceivably exhibit their work, but I cannot think of any at all. It feels unrealistic that this should happen, and it feels bleak to have to admit that,” I wrote in 2022 in a column for Fotografisk Tidskrift. I also criticized the former director of exhibitions at Fotografiska for her predictably tracked programme in a symposium at which we were both panelists.
Well, fast-forward to 2026, and here he is: Paul Mpagi Sepuya. One of the evident strengths of the exhibition, for me, is that it gives consideration to and brings forth queer masculinities. The beauty of Mpagi Sepuya’s work lies in how it conveys intimacy between queer men, dictated by a queer artist’s own lens and on the subjects’ terms. The bodies appear strong, yet soft and secure in their interactions, their gestures suggesting an ease within their own bodies.
Is Mpagi Sepuya presented as the big star that he in fact is? Suffice it to say, he would be front and center in many other possible displays of this exhibition. He would be the epicenter.
The more I stroll through the exhibition, the more I start thinking that, personally, the best way to take the temperature on how men are doing is by asking rhetorical questions such as: How easy and uncomplicated, in the zeitgeist, is the rapport between straight and non-straight men? How little are masculinities, as defined by average men, distinguished by sexuality, and where are we as a society when it comes to homophobia among cisgender straight men? The fact that there is now a concept called looksmaxxing, making beauty standards for straight men in general several notches more oppressive, increasingly mirroring those for women and gay men and closing the gap, perhaps says something about these rhetorical questions. I still feel a more direct way to address them is something an exhibition like this could concern itself with, which this one does not.
Interestingly, the most surprising presentations that feel the least like Fotografiska’s own canon are also the strongest and the exhibition’s highlights. Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik’s Bereitschaft, about reactionary ideas of self-improvement connected to the manosphere, comes across like an exhibition within the exhibition; perhaps a presentation fit for an international biennial, whichever. It looks absolutely pristine and tight-knit, with no fringes. While seeing an image that brings to mind homoerotic army hazing, of a number of men standing on the shoulder of a soldier appearing to do push-ups, I conclude that for stock images of army and wrestling to work, there ideally needs to be some amount of subversive humour, or at the very least something that subverts them beyond mere documentary.
Tracey Moffatt firmly established herself as one of Australia’s major international contemporary artists and a major lens-based artist, period, although for parts of the 2010s her art felt less visible in art discourse. Her inclusion with the facetiously titled video work Heaven might be altogether the biggest surprise and the greatest takeaway from Fotografiska. In part, it could sassily be described as “pervy creepshots” of surfers in Australia, often changing out of their wetsuits. That it is credited as “lovingly compiled” by Tracey Moffatt
stresses how the work sits within the terrain of works lensed by the female gaze, which shifts the object of objectification. It’s a work that as much activates a queer gaze. The camera continuously teases tan lines and flashes of tight, body-hugging speedos.
The speedo itself, in modern history a divisive functional garment, sits in a contradiction of often being written down as effeminate while also embodying aspirational athleticism. Historically, the butt of the joke whenever I’ve been in the US is how it’s a Southern European and Italian thing. But one can also contrast the prejudice around it with how commonplace it is, for instance, in Australia. Especially today, when homosocial gym culture, HYROX, CrossFit and looksmaxxing have “legitimized” the straight male gaze on male athletic contours, this work somehow hits time right through the backdoor, coming in from left field into the present.
Apropos biennials, Sara Sadik rose to prominence through her participation in Manifesta 13 in Marseille in 2020 (she was also featured in C-print’s The Sports Issue, published in print in 2022). A new-generation post-internet artist whose work explores the visual languages and social dynamics of social media, I saw her work earlier in the year at the Munch Triennale at the MUNCH Museum in Oslo, where game art as a genre was brought to the fore. Her Khtobtogone is an emulation of Grand Theft Auto V, featuring a hunky lead character of possibly Arab descent who embodies an emotionally intelligent man. His quest for love involves becoming the best version of himself before marrying the love of his life. It is a work of great airiness, poetry and tenderness, yet it feels somewhat shoehorned into its own room. This likely has been considered a benefit to the work, but the placement feels awkward, further emphasising the work’s artistic distance from most of the other works on display. Summa summarum, both the expected and the pleasantly surprising and unexpected are to be found. But I’m going to end with kudos to Fotografiska for, in some respects, stretching itself beyond its usual mould, something even the average visitor will recognise in this offering. Ashik Zaman Ashik Zaman is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of C-print Artists in Harder Better Faster Stronger – Are Men OK?: Ashley Markle, Brian Cliff Olguin, Brianna Jones, Elinor Carucci, Harri Pälviranta, Herb Ritts, Jakob Ganslmeier, Ana Zibelnik, Johan Bävman, Khidr Joseph, Mirielle Rohr, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Randall Xiao, Richard Renaldi, Rob Hornstra, Ron Jude, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Sander Coers, Sara Sadik, Sergey Melnitchenko, Tracey Moffatt, Valery Poshtarov, Wang Ziyu, Denis Valery Ndayishimiye, Sarah Makharine, Marcus Gustafsson, Tobias Åhlberg, Carlos Zaya, Linnéa Sonka, Sosi Chamoun. Images courtesy of Fotografiska