Text written by Joline Uvman

In Julia Sjölin, femininity looms. And as impossible as femininity can feel, Sjölin's work can be perceived as equally impossible at first glance.

In Sjölin's studio, large paintings lie on the floor. The motifs are abstract and elusive, repellent. The colors seem both too gray and too garish at the same time. The brushstrokes are in many dense layers, alternately thin and thick. They seem as if painted in the moment without much thought – rather as if by inspiration.

So in contrast to these smeary paintings stand her watchful works in moving image. There, the smeariness is exchanged for clear motifs; female figures that are observed and recorded by Sjölin through the camera lens. The pace is slow but often broken up into several clips at the same time.

It is when the paintings and video works are placed next to each other that that feeling of impossibility arises. As a viewer, therefore, both attention and perseverance are required – because it is in the contrasts and contradictions that we can clarify where Sjölin herself is and on what premises her works exist.

(Did any artist ever paint the Virgin at night?)
"All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass"

In the poem “NY at Night,” Julia Sjölin poses the hypothetical question of whether Innocence has ever been painted at night. She follows up with a line from Mina Loy’s poem “Magasins du Louvre”: All the eyes of innocence in the world are made of glass. It is around the gaze that Sjölin’s work centers.

The camera is Julia Sjölin's eye and the canvas her body. Over time, the work opens up and the flat surfaces – the canvas – the screen – become a landscape where the section, with Sjölin herself as a kind of center, alternates between observing and being observed. When the lens stubbornly follows the female figures in the picture, she simultaneously allows herself to be exposed in the painting. It is a generous act and a clever move. In a single action – the shift of medium – Sjölin points to the complexity of simultaneously existing as object and subject. The whole thing is rounded off and reaches a mystical peak when the camera zooms in from the height down towards the earth, towards the darkened landscape illuminated by the city lights. There she lies, the shimmering cityscape, always available for others to project.

There is a method that recurs in Julia Sjölin's work; cutting and clipping. The large paintings on the floor will be cut up and become smaller sections. The film medium is treated in a similar way where different clips are joined together, thereby reinforcing the feeling that we are looking at something cropped. In an extension, if the canvas is a body and the camera an eye, here we have something that bleeds.

Julia, who is also my friend, sends me a screenshot of a paragraph quoting the author Clarice Lispector. A kind of reflection occurs when I read:

“Every book is blood,” Lispector writes in, A Breath of Life. “It's pus, it's excrement, it's heart torn to shreds, it's nerves cut to pieces, it's electric shock, it's coagulated blood running like boiling lava down the mountain.”

Julia Sjölin's work is not impossible, it is all of these, works that explode themselves in an attempt to uncover something that is actually impossible – the being of the female body beyond the ascribed femininity.