Moderna Museet Malmö has opened the first solo exhibition in Sweden of the Estonian sculptor Anu Põder, who died in 2013. The show runs from 24 October 2026 to 21 February 2027 and traces three decades of work by an artist who made sculpture from plastic, wax, fat and textile, materials that are allowed to live their own lives, change and break down over time. It is one of only a few solo presentations of Põder's work to be held outside Estonia.

The exhibition follows her development from works rooted in bodily experience, made during the years of Soviet occupation, to later pieces that turn towards consumption and criticism of capitalism. It also presents her drawings in Sweden for the first time: the recently conserved sheets come from the artist's legacy collection and have not previously been shown in the country. The show spans the period from her early solo exhibitions in Estonia in the 1980s to the end of her career.

Põder's materials were often scavenged and improvised. In the 1980s she worked with pink plastic left over from medical supplies used to make orthoses, obtained through her brother, a doctor, and experimented with it in sculpture. One work museums frequently ask to borrow is "Tongues", made from soap; because the original is too fragile to travel from the Art Museum of Estonia's collection, the museum's conservator made a replica at Moderna Museet's request.

Her international profile gathered pace after a 2017 retrospective at the Art Museum of Estonia, and in 2022 her work was included in the Venice Biennale's main exhibition, "The Milk of Dreams", curated by Cecilia Alemani. The Malmö show is a collaboration between Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Moderna Museet Malmö, curated by Andreas Nilsson and Jo Widoff, and is due to travel to Stockholm in spring 2027 and to EMMA in Finland in autumn 2028.