Åsa Norberg and Jennie Sundén have been working together since 2005, when they were students at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. Their projects touch on stories in which art and society are interwoven and in which aesthetics seem to go hand in hand with social change.

Åsa Norberg and Jennie Sundén have been working together since 2005, when they were students at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. Their projects touch on stories in which art and society are interwoven and in which aesthetics seem to go hand in hand with social change.

A central aspect of Norberg and Sundén’s work is that they often carry on a dialogue with the work and achievements of other artists and educators. By combining various techniques, materials, forms, and theories, they aim to activate history and set ideas and styles in motion again.

For the Borås Art Biennial, the duo has made a series of new works that revolve around different perspec­tives on our material and social surroundings, and on how we become disconnected with the origins of the objects around us through the specialization of tech­nology and the increasingly complex chains and net­works of actors in the capitalist system. At the heart of Norberg and Sundén’s new collages are the mail order catalog and the history of the textile and clothing industry. Silhouettes of nature and consumption are woven together with stories about the conditions of the labor force and the story of a bouquet of carna­tion’s arrival in Sweden in the 1960s.

In dialogue with prior investigations of circulation and global interconnections, the works speak, for example, to the Borås-based clothing company Algot’s history, early mail-order business, and online sales today. This kind of corporate history is made up of several interesting stories about twentieth-century Sweden and the devel­opment of modern industry in Borås, which Norberg and Sundén are addressing here.

In 2020, the artists were featured in the exhibition A Table of Content at Kalmar Konstmuseum. They have contributed to exhibitions at Moderna Museet, the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, CF Hill, and Tensta Konsthall, all in Stockholm. Their work is repre­sented in the collections of the Stockholm School of Economics, Moderna Museet, the Public Art Agency Sweden, the City of Västerås, the Stockholm County Council, the Västra Götaland Regional Council, the City of Gothenburg, and private collectors.