Curatorial Text

The 2021 edition of the Borås Art Biennial presents the work of over twenty Swedish and international artists.

Deep listening for longing tunes into past and present imaginings of the city—and beyond. Learning how to listen deeply to each other’s experience is a way to build consciousness and a shared understanding of the world. New forms of collectivity are determined or defined by the depth of relationships and shared longing. It is the simple interactions that connect us, from how we relate to the people we encounter in our daily lives to how we show up in our relationships and how we exist within communities. These actions create the patterns that give rise to our social fabric.

As author Adrienne Maree Brown states in her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing World, it is the depth of relationships that determines the strength of a system: “critical connections over critical mass.” A number of the biennial artists explore the importance and transformational power of small and simple interactions as ways of renegotiating how one moves through the world.

Deep listening, as developed by composer Pauline Oliveros, is intimately linked to longing. Oliveros’s sonic meditations sought “to create an atmosphere of opening for all to be heard, with the understanding that listening is healing.” The practice extends beyond the traditional understanding of hearing to a relational and active listening that requires the presence of both body and mind. Many of the biennial artists enact an advanced form of listening that turns inwards, while at the same time finding a mode of outward deep listening that attempts to document, present, and understand the socio-cultural contexts, histories, and politics of our time.

Tobias Sjöberg’s art engages with the physical and metaphysical aspects of vision, perception, and perspective. His practice encompasses an ecology of sensing that foregrounds the somatic. Sjöberg’s new commission has been developed by listening to the specific context of the Gustav Adolf Church.

Jin Mustafa’s field recordings, combined with electronic compositions, explore questions of personal and collective memory, providing an alternative soundtrack to the city. The new sound work is presented in the city park alongside sculptures that act as listening points on which the public can sit, rest, or lie down.

Joe Namy’s new work is a visual and sonic composition. A collective offering from the city’s communities, in the form of donated fabrics and textiles, is used to create a large monochromatic curtain situated on a pedestrian bridge.

Nolan Dennis Oswald’s new commission questions the politics of space and time through the use of soil as a complex model for social life. Oswald’s ongoing series of Xenolith sculptures are to be found across Borås, and they link the city to an ongoing investigation of a black consciousness and the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.

Inspired by the history of third spaces, architect firm Okidoki’s floating pavilion is designed as a place for the public to collectively listen, share, and collaborate in building emotional bonds that breathe life into the city.

In Shilpa Gupta’s new public sculpture, a figure sits in silent dialogue with a tree. The work implicates the tree as an active agent in the exchange. Elsewhere, a light installation in the form of an animated sentence reads I Live Under Your Sky Too in Sámi, Swedish, and Urdu.

Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks. Her work defies categorization, exploring sculpture, public art, and urban transformation. 1.78 Borås is the title of Echelman’s sculpture installation that will temporarily be suspended high above Stora Torget, the main square in Borås, as part of the citywide celebration of the 400-year anniversary of the city’s founding.

The Qalam collective is based on the idea that writing and language are important in the process of decolonizing the senses and society. A smaller group of the polyphonic collective will participate in Borås Art Biennial with newly written texts that enters into a dialogue with the sculptures that are placed in Borås public space. Participants: Sandy Harry Ceesay, Sanna Ghotbi, Nilofar Haghighi, Ismaila Jallow, Masoud Vatankhah and Maxine Victor.

The photographic works of Akinbode Akinbiyi, Nina Mangalanayagam and Santiago Mostyn are presented in public spaces as part of Moving Out, a regional collaboration with the municipalities of Vårgårda and Bollebygd.

Nina Mangalanayagam’s series of photographs depicts nature and landscapes alongside portraits of herself and her mother, poetic explorations of belonging and rootedness.

Akinbode Akinbiyi regards hearing as a central aspect of his photographic process: “Our ears perceive more layers of an event than our eyes alone can see.” Akinbiyi presents a series of images that reveal the intimate spaces within sprawling megacities.

Santiago Mostyn's photographs give us narratives of movement, time, fragility and longing.

At Borås Art Museum, Renee Green’s Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words) (2020) is inspired by American Swedish poet May Swenson's poem 'Colors Without Objects' (1965) in a work composed of twenty-eight double-sided banners suspended from the gallery ceiling. The work invites viewers into a textual and spatial dialogue, with words, color, and form.

Compositions by Samson Young allow us to hear the impossible. Young’s installation features giant sculptures of a bugle and a trumpet that defy the laws of physics, only made possible by a collaboration with the research group NESS (Next Generation Sound Synthesis), whose software can digitally simulate what a hypothetical instrument would sound like.

Åsa Cederqvist’s presentation speaks of worlds that sit somewhere between conscious awareness and the subconscious, the ephemeral and the physical. Sculpture and video work explore themes of transformation and interconnectedness, and a spirituality and longing beyond the rational and anthropocentric world we live in.

James Webb’s new work contains sound, found objects, and text, invoking references to literature, cinema, and minimalist traditions.

Recent work by Christine Ödlund asks us to rethink our relationship to plants and nature, and in turn opens up a conversation about the limits of human knowledge.

Salad Hilowle’s video work Passion of Remembrance (2020) weaves together collective memories from the television shows and popular culture of 1990s Sweden with a very personal memory landscape of growing up in Sweden while black. It offers a black view of cultural artifacts that construct, limit, and attribute meaning to our understanding of who belongs and who doesn’t—an act of claiming and longing for a space that can become home.

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn presents a new iteration of the twenty-five-channel sound installation For an Epidemic Resistance (2009/2021). The work takes as its starting point an unexplained laughter epidemic. The sound of laughter doesn’t necessarily signal joy; it can also be a signal of distress, spurred by collective anxieties.

Hardeep Pandhal presents fifteen hand-drawn, monochromatic illustrations accompanied by music from a limited-edition cassette tape made by the Dungeon Synth composer Vandalorum. The work testifies to the artist’s ongoing research around fantasies of race, difference, and darkness and their influence on policies of oppression, where fiction and reality converge.

New moving image works by Rehana Zaman and Morgan Quaintance turn to personal and collective experiences to consider what role deep listening for longing holds in our current moment.

Angelica Mesiti’s two-screen installation Mother Tongue (2017) explores the way diverse communities in and around Aarhus, Denmark connect to their cultural heritage through music, dance, and song.

Anders Sunna’s paintings are made up of several layers of stories using a collage technique that carries on the Sami storytelling tradition. For the biennial Sunna draws on this tradition and paints a new work on the Borås Culture House.

At The Textile Museum, Åsa Norberg and Jennie Sundén’s new work for the biennial grows out of their research surrounding circulation and global interconnectedness, and is linked to the ready-made clothing company Algots, which started in 1907 in Borås. This company history consists of several interesting stories about twentieth-century Sweden and the development of modern industry in Borås.

Filipa César’s artwork Quantum Creole (2020) explores the subversive potential of weaving and how West African creole communities wove coded messages of social and political resistance into textiles, circumventing the technologies and languages of the colonists.