Alex Colard

ABOUT the artists

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) is a Berlin/London-based artist. They received an BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development. Their practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell the stories of Black Trans people. Danielle’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and performances at institutions such as Villa Arson, Nice (2023) Fact, liverpool (2022) David Kordansky, LA (2022) Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022); Skänes konstförening, Malmö, Sweden (2022); Arebyte Gallery, London (2021); QUAD, Derby, England (2021); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2021); Tate Modern, London (2020); Focal Point Gallery, London (2020); Science Gallery, London (2020); and MU Hybrid Art House, London (2020). Their work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2022); Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich (2019); Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019); and Barbican, London (2018).

Paula Slav/Damelva is a Scandinavian multi-dimensional artist, a woman/weapon seduced and induced by technology. She worships Nothing and she who lives inside and outside of time. She is a conjurer of the musical predilection as Godill, she is also armed with prose, from typewriter to cyberspace. She is the moth in the machine, the daughter’s daughter, the sweet blood, the will to will. Her music and performance has been featured at the Royal Institute of Art and Cinema Queer in Stockholm, PLX festival, Queer Noise Fest Stockholm, Etown Queerfest, O.C.D Fest Føkk den køen in Oslo, Norway, and more. She has been a hostess, artist and organizer at several clubs, most notably Technobastun. She has collaborated with artists including HAJ300 and Makode Lindé. Her art and poetry was last exhibited at the pop-up gallery Last Sunset for Today. She created the music for the dance performance L’Après-midi D’une Faune (2022) by Dinis Machado at ZDB Lisbon and Weld in Stockholm.

Xenia Klein and Nausi Love is an artist sex worker duo consisting of the artist Xenia Klein and her sex worker alias Nausi Love. Together they have a BFA in Fine Arts from Konstfack and an MFA in Artistic Research from The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. Since early 2022 the duo has worked together full-time. Creating art and performances. Selling porn and sex. Their joint practice blur the border between one of the most tabooed works – that of the sex worker and whore–with one of the most praised and glorified works – that of the artist. They won the Young Talent Award at the Dutch Design Week 2022 for re-imagining the escort industry according to transfeminine creativity and experience, implementing the perspectives of design and art in radically new ways on areas of human life and society often overlooked by art and design–the escort industry consisting of everything between brothels and independent sex workers.

Curators’ biographies
Andria Nyberg Forshage is a writer, poet, art worker, and independent researcher based in Stockholm. They are a contributing editor for Paletten Art Journal. She publishes essays, poetry, criticism, and experimental/artistic text, e.g. in The Lulu-Journal, Kontext, and Datableed, and has presented her research on trans aesthetics and queer political philosophy including at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Royal Holloway Centre for Continental Philosophy, The Posthumanities Hub and the Eco- and Bioart Lab, Linköping University, Karlstad University, and the conference Trans*Studies at the University of Arizona. Recent projects include co-writing and dramaturgy for the performance fera (2023, dir. Ruby Nilsson) and work with Autostrada Biennial through CuratorLab.

Ruby Nilsson is a director, playwright and writer. Her work is about the construction of the liminal and the (trans)feminine, conducted at the intersection between visual art and performing arts. She is a recurring writer in Paletten Art Journal and her work has been shown at Reaktorhallen (Stockholm), Turteatern (Stockholm), Atalante (Gothenburg), Estrad Norr (Östersund) among others. Was last seen with the work fera, which was co-produced by Inkonst. Fera will also be shown during the autumn as part of GIBCA at Göteborgs Konsthall and Fylkingen in Stockholm.

ABOUT the exhibition

It gathers works by three contemporary artists, international and local, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Xenia Klein, and Paula Slav, whose work in different ways touches upon trans femininity and trans survival. The exhibition tries to re-imagine trans-fem aesthetics, not as an identity category so much as it is a potentially open way of differentiating and undermining gendered categorization. How can we open up other spaces, virtual and actual-other ways of feeling, encountering, and sensing? The exhibition gathers perceptual and (a)signifying means of working with transversal, intersectional and transfeminist organizing within and outside the arts. We want to envision forms of world-making and support structures for trans survival at all scales, cutting across and working against cisnormative and transmisogynist conditions in which we’re often isolated even when we’re included.

The title of the exhibition is a quote from the text “subject: statement” by artist, trans/queer activist and poet kari edwards (1954-2006). It implies that queer and trans-fem aesthetics can break up the power that hierarchies, borders, and exploitation has on our collective imagination. Create glitches in the way that a body holds space, or the way that space holds a body. Not to arrive with fully formed identities, but to allow for the emergence of other ways of relating to each other and oneself. Or as writer Marquis Bey put it recently: “We are beckoned to be on the run toward something terrifying, runnin’ toward a queer and hella strange nonplace, a nonplace with a ‘completely other history of paradoxical laws and non-dialectical continuities, absolutely heterogeneous pockets, irreducible particularities, of unheard of and incalculable sexual differences.”” (Black Trans Feminism, 2022, 111)

Trans feminine aesthetics concerns trans women, trans fems, or other people with experiences of trans- misogyny. But it doesn’t do so exclusively or in a way that can be determined in advance. It marks, as an open question, particular relationships to language, image and expression resistant to oppression and marginalization, such as transphobia, racism, capitalism, and sexism. The works that are present in this exhibition each suggest different ways of reshaping, remembering, reimagining, resurrecting, or re-rendering what is understood by identity, flesh, sex, labor, and perception.

Curation and text: Andria Nyberg Forshage and Ruby Nilsson Translation: Andria Nyberg Forshage Graphic design: Mika Kastner Johnson Technicians: Lisa Trogen Devgun, Erik Viklund and Johan Österholm Symposium participants on May 12th: Vala T. Foltyn, Eva Hayward, Dinis Machado, Nat Raha, Maxi Wallenhorst Co-produced by Konsthall C With support from Swedish Arts Council In collaboration with IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts Thank you to the artists and to Ulrika Flink and Erik Annerborn

ABOUT the gallery

Konsthall C is a public work of art, an urban renewal project and an art institution located in a former communal laundry in Hökarängen.
Since the start in 2004, we have organized exhibitions and events based on the neighbourhood’s history and present, its people and its environment.

Konsthall C was initiated in 2004 as a collaboration between the artist Per Hasselberg, Hökarängen’s Civil City Council, Stockholmshem and Moment:teater. Hökarängen’s Civil City Council had previously worked for a vital cultural and association life in the area, and Per’s art had since the 90s revolved around the borderland between art, urban planning and democracy. Together, they established Konsthall C in Stockholmshem’s former central laundry in Hökarängen. From the beginning, the gallery’s status was more of a work of art and was exhibited at Moderna Museet in 2006. Over the years, the art gallery has grown and made permanent activities of what was once an artistic experiment.

Today, the activities mainly consist of the temporary artistic program, shaped by our artistic leader on site. It usually contains an exhibition program, regular events and longer art projects that take place in and outside Konsthall C. In addition to the artistic program, there are also several so-called fixed formats, which are permanent elements in the art gallery’s activities. These include the pedagogical collaboration Konst I Förskolan, the self-organized gallery Centrifug, the AiR platform the Research Station, the Hökarängen Archive and our shop.

In recent years, Konsthall C has been characterized by a high international profile and relevance. The artists who exhibit come from all over the world, which has made the gallery an important player in national and international art life. At Konsthall C, new artistic strategies are tried out, as well as new ways of organizing and displaying art and culture. The artistic director, who is replaced at regular intervals, is chosen based on an idea of ​​how new art expressions can interact with Hökarängen as a place. The time at Konsthall C allows unestablished talents to experiment with the organization, in mutual learning which often leads to a daring and forward-thinking program.

The objectives of Konsthall C:

To be a leading actor in socially engaged practices, centered around supporting new curatorial and artistic experiments and thinking.
To be a strong voice in discussions of justice, democracy and urban development.
To be a visible actor in Hökarängen, by connecting its activities to Hökarängen’s local history, local associations and local development.
To ensure the activities of the Konsthall are of concern for those living and working in Hökarängen, for residents in and around Stockholm, and a national and international art audience.
To develop and strengthen its established networks and actively create new networks, partnerships and collaborations.
To produce programs that have relevance to and engage a diverse audience.
To work for sustainable economic conditions for itself, and the sustainable operation of cultural institutions in Sweden and beyond.
Do you want to know more about our history? Contact us at info@konsthallc.se.
https://www.konsthallc.se/

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Charity Art Auction, June 10, 2023