AMSTERDAM.- Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography is presenting Rooms We Made Safe, the first museum exhibition by the rising artist Michella Bredahl (1988, Greve, Denmark). Bredahl is known for her distinctively intimate portraits of friends and acquaintances, capturing them in unguarded moments at home. Yet a home does not necessarily mean safety. Tracing a deeply personal lineage, the show reaches back to photographs taken by Bredahl’s mother before her birth, and those they created together during her childhood.

Bredahl grew up in a social housing district on the outskirts of Copenhagen with her single mother and her younger sister. The apartment was filled with a vibrant colour palette that defied the prevailing minimalist Scandinavian aesthetic. Each room had its own distinct hue: deep blue, bright red, and floral patterns blooming across the surfaces. When Bredahl was seven, her mother handed her camera to her. Together they would document their shared intimate daily lives. At a young age the two sisters were confronted with their mother’s addiction, which had a deep impact on them. In Rooms We Made Safe Bredahl revisits the terrain of her youth, once a dangerous space, and reimagines it into a powerful artistic expression. Each of Huis Marseille’s rooms is assigned to a different period of her work, paying homage to her documentation of domestic spaces.

‘Many of my photographs feel like extensions of my mother and sister or even self-portraits.’ -- Michella Bredahl

Exploration of femininity

Shortly after her studies Bredahl started going to Paris on a regular basis, where she settled in 2020. The city offered the warmer tones she had been seeking, along with a rich cultural diversity. Bredahl began documenting people that were close to her: friends, her friends’ children, and artists from her community. The portraits reveal an attraction to people that share a sense of femininity – an experience she does not regard as fixed and exclusive, but as fluid, multifaceted, and shaped by the presence of each subject. Bredahl photographs them within the safety of their own homes, creating a deeply personal atmosphere, enhanced by the depth and rich colour palette of the analogue prints. A substantial selection of her portraits was compiled in her first monograph Love Me Again (Loose Joints Publishing, 2023), which marked a pivotal moment in her career, attracting attention from the international art scene.

Pole dancing

Through her graduation film Chassé (2019), which follows a group of dancers, Bredahl befriended one of the pole dancers. They began taking classes together, which was the starting point for Bredahl’s investigation of pole dancing both personally and through her camera. She is captivated by the immense physical strength required for the complicated moves, as well as the dancers’ liberating confidence while in the vulnerable position of being undressed. Many of the pole dancers practice it in their own living environments. Their graceful movements are directed inwards, towards feeling beautiful in their own skin, or shared with the occasional eyes of a loved one. For Bredahl, dance feels like the closest thing to photography: with a shared sense of release, of freedom, and of being fully present in a single moment. The subject is a natural extension of Bredahl’s artistic interest in the intimate and the domestic. The resulting photographs pay tribute to the strength of the female body.

Miu Miu

In Paris Michella Bredahl became part of the vibrant cultural scene where she first met the renowned stylist Lotta Volkova. Given Volkova’s role as a styling consultant for Miu Miu (a fashion label launched by Prada), they decided to collaborate on this series of pole dancers shot in their homes or in studios around Paris, styled in the Miu Miu Autumn Winter 2024 collection. As in much of her work, Bredahl casts her friends and community as protagonists in these stories. Their portraits are rich with intriguing contradictions. The sometimes cluttered domestic settings stand in stark contrast with the dancers’ graceful poses. The clothing adds another layer: it both challenges the tendency to equate pole dancing with striptease and complicates the dance physically, since bare skin is usually essential for maintaining grip. This series was published as a book, and subsequently Bredahl and Volkova have continued their creative collaboration, shooting an advertising campaign for Miu Miu Upcyled 2025.

Motherhood and daughterhood

One of the themes of the exhibition is the beauty and complexity of motherhood and daughterhood. By showing photos from her own family archive, Bredahl includes her own intimate history and the genesis of her work. Images of her mother in the 1970s and early 1980s bring a historical dimension of the (self-)expression of femininity and show how a creative urge has been passed on. Raw photographs of the 1990s show a mother going through addition, seen from the eyes of her child. They offer an honest glimpse into a family’s life, with the challenges, the joy, and the complexity behind the story that only a child living it could truly understand.

Michella Bredahl

Michella Bredahl studied photography at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography (2010-2011), followed by a degree in documentary film-making from the National Film School of Denmark (2015-2019). In 2023 she released her first monograph, Love Me Again, with Loose Joints Publishing. Over the past two years her intimate approach to portraiture gained international recognition as a new voice by such publications as The Guardian; large assignments and the presentation Unmade Beds in project space Shoot the Lobster (2023, New York) followed. Rooms We Made Safe is Bredahl’s first major museum solo exhibition. In 2026 the works will tour to Kunstmuseum Brandts and the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark.

Accompanying the exhibition is the publication: Rooms We Made Safe by Michella Bredahl, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Text by Stephanie LaCava designed by Kühle und Mozer.