Great artistic range and an investigative approach. The group exhibition, and the collaboration between the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Love, Body and Work – Artistic Research in Uncertain Times, is far from a closed seminar room at a distinguished distance from the noise of time. Instead, it stands in the middle of the difficult questions of our time.

The establishment of artistic research in Sweden is part of a shift in the art field. Artists are seeking new areas, new ways of working. The movement enables encounters with a broader social context; we see new contexts for artists to work that lie outside the traditional studio situation. For experimental and research-based art that has had difficulty finding a place within traditional channels of communication, the research environment of art academies can become an important point of contact. The opportunity to both turn inward in learning and at the same time open its doors in conversation with the world provides opportunities for in-depth work with and about art. In an ongoing collaboration between the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, visitors encounter an art academies that encourages mobility and openness between teaching and research, studio, academy and exhibition space, between the university and the larger world. The invitation to exhibit this time has gone to researchers at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts who are running or have recently completed an externally funded research project.

The participating artists all share a strong commitment to the issues of the time. Recurring is the vulnerability of the body in different systems, both political, technological, scientific, and artistic. Unabashed visits to the language of other disciplines open up for dizzying shifts in perspective. The attitude corresponds to the freedom that artistic research is given at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, an insight that a field of research can only become truly innovative if it is allowed to find its own unbroken paths. In the halls of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, both the historical dependence and change over time of the exhibition and the art school will be palpably present. The open form that several of the works have, by being unfinished and still part of an ongoing research process, breaks with a museological tradition of exhibiting completed objects. The exhibition also takes place in a digital space, if anything a sign of the times. Due to the ongoing pandemic, performative works and a program of conversations will be performed for a smaller audience and simultaneously streamed online.

Participants:
Annika Larsson
Bjorn Larsson & Carl Johan Erikson
Filippa Arrias
George Kentros
Goldin+Senneby
Karin Hansson
Mara Lee
Nils Claesson
Per Hasselberg
Petra Bauer & Marius Dybwad Brandrud
Shiva Anoushirvani
Åsa Andersson Broms

Curator: Sara Arrhenius
Producers: Meryem Saadi, Silvia Thomackenstein

Caption: “Work a Work (Artist Salary)”