With Kajsa Dahlberg and Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation
Damaged still image from a 1987 film by Victor Kyzyma (damage caused by agricultural lime), Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History of East Central Europe
Residency dates: 2 March - 1 April 2022
This residency proposes a process of collective research into relationships between body and environment, through an investigation of the impact of chemicals and toxins on human and non-human bodies.
Kajsa Dahlberg writes:
I still vividly remember the childhood sensation of visiting my grandmother’s tiny fabric store in the (then) working class neighbourhood of Majorna in Göteborg. I would suffer immediate physical reactions: itchy eyes and throat, nausea and fatigue – plus an emotional conflict between the comfort I felt in the company of my grandmother and the messages coming from my body, telling me, “Get out!” Even as a small child I was able to sense the significance of the shop and its contents as a place that was simultaneously familiar and deviant, even threatening.
This residency sets out to investigate environmental pollution and its unequal effects on all things living and non-living from the perspective of transcorporality – a concept developed by Stacy Alaimo to describe the ways that human and non-human bodies are “intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them.”
We are all exposed to a material world that is constantly moving in and through our bodies. In this respect the body could be seen as the instrument through which we register our environment. When overexposed, the body autonomously sets boundaries, and in this process, it also describes the world from which it emerges. It is one way of being in touch; of being in a reciprocal relation to the world.
An example: Parallel to the growth of the petrochemical industries since World War II –i.e. the beginning of what has been named the Anthropocene Epoch– more and more people experience bodily reactions to "normal" amounts of environmental toxins. These toxins come from an increased use of agricultural fertilizers and pesticides. Synthetic materials such as particle board, plastics, food additives. Chemicals used by the textile industry.
Throughout the course of the residency participants will be invited to question the ways in which their bodies become registers of their environments. Questions guiding this enquiry include: What is the threshold between that which is toxic and that which is not? How do we, the residency group, register the Anthropocene in our bodies and by what normative standards? What is a normal body? In what instances do our intensities and sensitivities become strengths that help us see the world as habitable and animate? What opportunities arise when we have non-normative experiences of the world?
To understand ourselves as trans-corporal subjects for the duration of the residency means not only to put emphasis on the possibilities and limits of our own corporeal selves, but it also entails acknowledging that the marks left across bodies are not equally distributed. They are informed by the conditions under which one works and are connected to the landscapes one inhabits. This opens up questions such as: whose bodies sustain the most extreme impacts of contemporary industrial production? In what ways does pollution extend beyond geopolitical boundaries and how are these ongoing material interactions gendered, racialized and reverberated by massive inequality?
Research Approach
This investigation “moves through” bodies both literally and metaphorically, inviting multi-disciplinary perspectives. Applications are welcomed from potential participants whose approaches may be historical, nonhuman, medical, ecological, legal, geological, personal, political or otherwise relevant to the residency agenda. Kajsa Dahlberg hopes to bring together a group of collaborators from diverse backgrounds to focus on a process of collective learning, research and the sharing of experience.
The residency’s key foci will be; on the ways that the interactions of material worlds and bodies become visible; on the variable politics of representation that inflect those processes; on the relationships between the body as instrument, registering the world that surrounds it; and the physical registrations that artists make via images, sound and the reorganisation of matter.
Through the residency, participants will engage with spaces and things, seasides and roadsides and each other, through presentations, readings and talks, physical and imaginative exercises, queerfeminist discourse,affect theory, crip theory, environmental activism and/or much more.
Potential Outcomes
The residency aims to bring together aspects of the residents’ collective research into a publication or another form, to be launched at Index in Stockholm – most likely alongside Dahlberg’s upcoming solo presentation at the gallery (dependent on Covid and/or other contingencies).
About Kajsa Dahlberg
Kajsa Dahlberg is a visual artist living in Oslo. She received her MFA at the Art Academy in Malmö 1998-2003 and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Program in New York in 2007-08. Dahlberg’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Parra & Romero in Madrid, and Lunds Konsthall. Her contributions to museums and biennials include works for Moderna Museet Stockholm, Malmö Art Museum, 8 Bienal do Mercosul, Manifesta 8, and GIBCA 2019.
Dahlberg is currently undertaking a PhD at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. This practice-based research looks at ways in which nonhuman modes of life are embedded in human-generated manifestations of visual culture, specifically investigating film as an apparatus deriving from seaweed bodies and kelp forests. Part of her research looks at the work of Danish playwright Ulla Ryum, exploring non-linear modes of storytelling as a way to decenter humanist perceptions of temporality. Here, the (camera)lens, rather than being the threshold between that which is registered and that which is not, becomes a device to engage a reciprocal relationship with the world. Alongside this her research investigates seaweed’s role in the history of photography as the source of iodine used in the first forms of fixed chemical photography, and polyphenols that function as an active agent in the developing of analogue film. Invoking the work of Jean Epstein and others, this project probes cinematography´s capacity to discover perspectives other than those of (human) optics.
About Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation
Index has multiple public roles as an art institution. A platform for audiences as well as artists, it understands that the role of an art institution does not begin and end with an exhibition – its activities, research, learning programs and relationships are ongoing and multifaceted. Index aims to carve out space and time for criticality, dialogue and curiosity, building discursive situations that develop the role of art today. www.indexfoundation.se
Index is co-convenor of this residency. Staff from Index will engage remotely with aspects of the residency and its residents. Following the residency, there is potential for a publication or another form of research output to be launched at both PRAKSIS and Index.
The Residents
Timeline
Open Call Deadline: 11.59 CET, 09 January 2022
Interviews: 24 January – 28 January 2022
Residency: 2 March - 1 April 2022
