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‘A Body of Ghosts’ - (2020)
The Royal Art Academy, Stockholm
A Body of Ghosts, 2015 - 2020.
Based on a series of attempts to capture, focus andpreserve memories and what has been lost, A Body of Ghosts evokes what moves in the destructive, towards oblivion or forgetfulness. Before I forget, I want to tell you about the loss of a close friend and about a time that changed us
fundamentally. I want you to see the struggles that take place on the periphery of society. I want to talk about the transition, both physical and invisible, from boy to woman.
This work is a construction containing our stories, Meril’s and mine, wherein memories and collected objects meet and reconfigure, the everyday and the suggestive intertwine. I find myself in the gap between dream and reality, a process that has led me to an obscure place where a distortion occurs; a place where time uncovers fragments from then and now.
Emotions, situations and events have been loaded into these objects: an H&M jacket I wore when I got dumped at the age of 24, and after which I never felt the same kind of youthful, burning love. Casts of a vaginal dilator, at 5, 6, 7, 8, inches, to be used after gender reassignment surgery and forever more. Thus objects undergo transitions into sculptures. Sculptures become symbols of crucial memories, repetitions and imitations of the original. Time has been left in the material, something non-physical placed in the physical.
My life mirrors Meril, but something remains out of reach. Screens of latex and metal shield my ambivalence towards this revelation of self. The camera inhibiting the act of remembering, keeping me from a long-lost friend. Photosensitive, only to be kept in the dark.
Here, the works are partially concealed; the visitor must enter behind architectural partitions or into a hidden room in order to receive the whole story. The visitor is a voyeur outside the work but once inside it, becomes the observed. Behind each layer is a new fragment of the whole and thus the story unfolds. A Body of Ghosts in the void.