Fryd Frydendahl

Happy Meal

Eighteen is pleased to present 

Happy Meal
An American Side Quest by Fryd Frydendahl

November 20, 2026 – January 23, 2027

Distressed blue jeans, golden credit cards, amusement parks, fast food joints, choreographed casinos with faux Greek interiors, alluring take-away and to-go packaging, police officers posturing like proper movie cops, Nike sports socks, superheroes, Halloween props, microwave ovens on marble tabletops. Iconic American imagery.

Happy Meal explores faith, capitalism, endorphins, cultural icons, nostalgia, fear, and fiction in a contemporary American context. Through photography, moving images, and sculptural objects, Frydendahl reflects on her complex relationship with the United States, where she lived between 2008 and 2020 and with which she has maintained close ties—a relationship shaped by ambivalence: love, fear, free(doom), fascination, friendships, scepticism, and all the other emotions on the classic return flight spectrum between Europe and America.

The exhibition brings together works that capture this complexity by utilizing different modes of documentary photography. Frydendahl engages with diaristic, point-and-shoot, street-style, reenactment, and dry forensic photography. The interplay between these aesthetic positions reflects Frydendahl’s approach to photography as a dynamic and exploratory medium, while also commenting on how different types of photography help shape our understanding of the world. The formats are intimate, the physical framing austere, and the installation offers the viewer space for individually structured narratives. The photographic works are complemented by sculptural objects in which American icons are merged, lifted from the photo-based works, and translated into physical form, moving from one plane to another as cloned, modelled, physical avatars. A new video work intertwines the playfully voyeuristic and the diaristic, accentuating Frydendahl’s quest for exploring the magical in the mundane.

There is a distinct friction in the exhibition; some works are vulnerable, curious, and sincere, while others are wonderfully 'fist-bump blunt,' and some convey an uneasy cocktail of dread and beauty. American icons—capitalist, religious, and cultural signifiers—are examined, questioned, and recontextualized in Happy Meal: an American Side Quest by Fryd Frydendahl.

Fryd Frydendahl, b. 1984, Hvide Sande, Denmark. Lives and works in New York, Copenhagen, and Hvide Sande.

Over the past 15 years, Frydendahl has marked herself as one of her generation’s most important photographic artists, dedicated to a repertoire of intimate photography. Known for her empathetic approach, Frydendahl explores themes of loneliness, friendship, love, loss, and family bonds, conceptualising these subjects in a way that makes the work relatable to an audience, combining tenderness with playfulness. Early in her career, she discovered that her photography is most powerful when personal yet never private. Drawing from her immediate surroundings, she creates intimate, narrative images that capture the poignancy of everyday life and human relationships. Frydendahl's work is included in the collections of the Moderna Museet, the National Museum of Photography, the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), and the Brandts Museum of Art. In 2024, Frydendahl was honoured with the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Prize.

Happy Meal: an American Side Quest is Fryd Frydendahl’s 4th solo exhibition with V1 Gallery.