The Royal Institute of Art
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Tomhet och dess omgivande rymd
No full textThis essay discusses the way positive and negative space, grounded in taoist philosophy, shape our physical environment and lived experience. I talk about this concept in terms of my own works but also explain how emptiness or a gap are a structure that uphold everything in this world. From music, to the cities we live in. The grid emerges as a literal and symbolic structure for organizing modern life, yet contributing to alienation. Which has led to our current society driven by consumerism and greed. I use the metaphor of the grid as a structure and a vessel, both as a system to make people or things conform but also as complex and of dual nature. It hints towards the more spiritual and simple side of life that we lack today. A lifestyle that is depriving us of poetic encounters in everyday life. I use examples from Stockholm and Tokyo to explain how emptiness and vacancies within cities are the physical embodiment of the values and circumstances of a certain place and its people. I discuss the performative act of moving material around the city in my practice and which interventions are considered natural and not. In my process I embrace unforeseen things happening and let chance, error, or the most natural way guide me forward
KLADD : Om tomrum, beröring och materian av underhåll
No full textRooted in experiences from the everyday, this essay explores voids, touch, and the matter of maintenance through a philosophical lens
Making
No full textThis essay is a follow-up to my bachelor thesis in which I examined the entanglement between belief systems, art and technology, and how it influences western contemporary art. One of the underlaying themes was that the development of technology and culture has been historically interlinked with both warfare and magic throughout history as well as in our present. In this essay I use some of the ideas present in that thesis, in order to explore what art means to me and how I view it, using a few key words to open up towards aspects of art-making and notions related to it that are of particular interest to my practice at this moment: A. Making, B. Magic, C. Thing, D. System, E. Sacral. I depart from the ideas of Gilbert Simondon in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, in which he develops a specific perspective for looking at the human world, by stipulating a sort of initial human existence as a mode of magical unity between ground and figure, which splits into separate phases, with figure splitting into the phase of technicity, and ground into religion. These are phases that then in turn split into further fields such as philosophy, ethics, etc. The aesthetic feeling, he argues, is one that originates from the initial magical state of unity, and which, through art, amongst other things, can merge perception of reality into something that is reminiscent of that initial state of unity. Among other things, the quotes from the interview with Donald Judd and Frank Stella represent an attitude, a wish to make a clean slate with something which is no longer useful or valid
Master of Fine Arts - Graduation Show 2024 Royal Institute of Art : MFA 2024 Avgångsutställning Kungl. Konsthögskolan
No full text: Mejan Press, Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm</p
Exploring the Universe through colors and sound
No full textThis essay summarizes my artistry and approach as it has evolved during my five years at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. My artistry is multidisciplinary where I find inspiration in art, technology, science, and society. My artistic process often relates to a full concept, where I explore and tell multi-layered stories. I study and engage with scientific theories and engage with them in a playful and experimental non-scientific way. These stories are expressed in my work that are physical and digital created from my intent and from physical phenomena that the eye cannot always see. I firstly describe how I have created paintings by using technology generated frequencies and how I have put them on canvas. “Painting with technology frequencies and vibrations” uses a technology-oriented approach in making paintings inspired from the Chladni plate method. The conclusion is that it was possible to capture frequencies on canvas. Secondly, I describe how I have made paintings, and associated pieces, that relate to frequencies and disturbances in human characteristics. For the concept “Painting with emotional frequencies and vibrations” I brought in phenomena from quantum physics and specifically the observer effect to make the paintings. I focused on morals and ethics and how art possibly can positively affect us human beings. In my mind I also drew parallels to the future mass-surveillance society and how we may be affected by being observed all the time.
Suicide Aesthetics
No full textThis is an essay examining an artistic production mode revolving around text. Within the essay, the reader will find the manuscript Suicide Aesthetics, outlining the theoretical concept with the same name. The concept encapsulates a particular yet wide ranging, highly commodified, late-capitalist formula of aesthetics coupled with perpetual intensification. The aesthetics thrive in their constant transformation towards something better. Something prettier; stronger; sexier; bigger; smaller, glitterier; hotter, cooler, shinier, slicker, more expensive, cheaper, glossier. More often than not, these aesthetics are detrimental to the subjects that desire or enjoy them. Suicide aesthetics are also distinctive in that they lead to their own collapse. As this essay will explore, the need for constant intensification or acceleration, and the paradoxical elements inherent to this drive, is what precipitates the collapse. The manuscript is followed by reflections on performative respectively academic writing, as well as on my artistic practice in general and my MFA thesis exhibition, Trouble Looking For a Place to Happen, in particular (Galleri Mejan, Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, 2024). I touch upon references which have been crucial to my writing as well as to the flesh of suidide aesthetics; cute accelerationism by Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, necropolitics by Achille Mbembe and cruel optimism by Lauren Berlant. By discussing my own true fandom of the True Blood character Sookie Stackhouse, I further on relate suicide aesthetics to fandom, and examine fandom as it has shaped the material output in Trouble Looking For a Place to Happen, and generated a collection of readymade and semi-ready made merch objects.Trouble Looking for a Place to Happen was the title of my MFA thesis exhibition. It was on at Galleri Mejan in Stockholm between 22nd of Novemer – 1 of December 2024. The exhibition was a monument of obsession to the hottest Sookie Stackhouse – the protagonist of the TV series True Blood. Sculptures, pictures, merch, dust and readymades of the installation were all placed in the space to tell the story of a fan’s true love of the 25 year old telepath and waitress.
Out Of Everything I Miss Myself The Most : A set of stories about Hong Kong, Heidegger, the other f-word that isn't funny (fecundity), my father, and Henry.
No full textThis essay explores the concept of societal fecundity—the collective capacity to generate new and diverse ideas—as a counterpoint to the homogeny and monopolization of cultural, technological, and social frameworks. Drawing on personal anecdotes, historical moments, and philosophical reflections, it examines how shifts in cultural paradigms often arise from moments of disillusionment, rupture, and the embrace of “otherness.” The essay draws on Murray Bookchin’s critique of consensus, emphasizing the importance of fostering dissonance and minority perspectives within society to cultivate innovation. By examining the example of Hong Kong’s protesters, it argues that creativity often emerges from those at the margins, where new technologies and frameworks for understanding the world are born in response to systemic challenges. Technology, the essay argues, is not neutral—it is a construct of human intention and values. As such, it can and should be remade to reflect diverse ways of Being. Today’s fixation on individual genius, embodied in figures like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, ignores the collective processes and fertile disagreements that truly drive societal progress. It advocates for a world defined by the fecundity of ideas, where dissonance and diversity are embraced as essential to creativity and social renewal
Remember the future?
No full textMy art is made of recycled materials, heavy with history and (lost) meaning even before they go through my process of processing, refining them. The unique qualities and backstories of each material not only create layers visually and aesthetically but also contribute to the ideas and narratives I present. The central concept in my work is what I call Postfuturism (not related to film history): the phenomena where our collective view of the future has drastically shifted from positive and hopeful to an increasingly dystopian and grim one. While human scientific and technological advancements are fulfilling and surpassing the Sci-Fi dreams of the past, escalating climate disasters, wars and economic draining of the working and middle classes leave us confused. ”The future isn’t happening - but soon you can live for 200 years?”. Psychologists don’t know how to help the inflating amounts of people with future dread, because the source of their emotional suffering isn’t just in their head. The younger generations feel robbed of the opportunities their ancestors had. Navigating mental illness always involved differentiating between environmental factors and that which comes from within, and because the mental health industry is just that - an industry that profits off its customers, the mentally unwell - now more than ever is the time to question our insanity and express our thoughts and feeling which is where art comes back into the picture. Notoriously one of the most effective forms of therapy, we need genuine, honest and emotional art now more than ever. My installations celebrates the healing properties of making through repetition and allowing fluctuating degrees of precision, thus performing as an act of disclosing the artist’s own healing journey and becoming an abstracted guide through the socioeconomical, geopolitical and personal causes for the unease that permeates my work
Reading with Echo
No full textReading with Echo is an experiment in collaborative creation, that Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva have been developing for the past five years. Each and every reading, in their view, is informed by other readings that have taken place and also each and every reading is already (a possible, potential, or virtual) part of readings to come. This is because while Tarot readers may develop their own ways of reading a spread and interpreting a card, these will be already influenced by previous Tarot readings or what she or he may have read in a book or online. Poethical Readings, the initial form of their collaboration, is oriented by the question of how to image ethics with/out the modern subject. The practice experiments with symbolic tools, including astrology, philosophy, palm reading, herbal healing, fake therapy, political therapy, Reiki, and the Tarot. Each session creates a space for a collective reading of an image, which captures the inseparability of the political and ethical dimensions of a personal, a collective, or global situation or question. The Sensing Salon, the studio practice they have designed, expands the image of art beyond objects, events, and discourse to include the healing arts. Through formats that facilitate collaborative study and experiment with practices and tools for reading and healing, the Sensing Salon fosters a form of sociality that attends to our deeply implicated existence. The Echo Tarot Deck embodies the very idea of reading that characterizes their practice, both Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon. This exhibition gathers the various moments of a five-year long process. The deck has been inspired by poethical readings of Ai Ogawa’s poems, in which we use Tarot spreads and Reiki sessions to assemble the meaning of each card as well as of the deck itself. It differs greatly from the traditional tarot decks, not so much in content but in terms of its ethical presuppositions. Instead of a linear trajectory of self-actualization (self-development) represented by The Magician, in the Echo deck, the Major Arcana combine into a complex composition while, in the Minor Arcana, instead of sequentiality (and its sense of development) the cards signal elementality (and its sense of implicancy). Overall the deck foregrounds materiality, as transformability, for it allows us to image the ethical, through the inseparability of the emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual, and the corporeal