Totally Stockholm 1
cool. When you hang out with people who aren’t in
the art world, and you say you hate paintings, they don’t understand that. But if you’re more in there, art people are like ‘paintings are too easy to sell’, and it’s the same thing with photography. I guess at least if you are from a kind of leftist and queer art community and practise, the selling point obviously is not that glamourized and in general is a pretty bad measure for the quality of an artwork, according to me. I think what’s fun with the photography community though, they don’t explore so much outside of the frame, literally. Photos usually just stay inside of the frame. So I guess I’ve come to terms with calling myself a photographer, sometimes this community needs a little shaking up. I love the internet, and I guess I am an Instagram artist, it’s an important part of my practice. Some people would say they just use Instagram to showcase their art, but I know it affects my art too, and I want to be conscious that it goes both ways, y’know? I find that interesting. Because they’re very different things. Yeah! Having sex is mainly like looking ugly, and doing weird positions with your body. Sexy is something you’re not doing a lot while having sex, to be sexy you need to be self-conscious and I mean you can be that when you have sex, but in my experience that leads to not so good sex if you are too aware and think too much about how you look in that situation. I’m doing an Instagram takeover on Fotografiska and someone commented like ‘Oh, so you’re trying to shame people for feeling sexual feelings towards something?’. It’s not that, and I told a friend yesterday ‘I would get offended if nobody ever masturbated looking at my photos, but I don’t ever want to know about it’. It’s different things! I just don’t wanna know about it. Just because someone sees something as sexy, doesn’t mean like I feel like that, or I feel like that towards them, or that that that image with me in it to me represents anything sexual. It’s not that an image can’t be sexual, but it’s about questioning and not taking for granted that that’s the Yeah, even if you do super queer art that’s anti-aesthetics. There are a lot of 70s performances that try and be gross, or anti, queer aesthetics that try and subvert things. But usually that gets sexualised too. So it doesn’t matter where on the spectrum you end up, even if the person isn’t seen as a generic body, it’s always got the connotations of sex. I just feel like, god damn yeah you can have sex with bodies, but most of the time my body isn’t having sex, even a body that has relatively a lot of sex is probably spending their time mainly doing other stuff! So how do you go about making art that challenges or defies that effect? Honestly, I don’t think I can really do anything that, in the imagery, defies that so much. It’s more to do with the theory and talking about it. Because if I just left my things without saying anything about it, it would be read in a different way. So it’s about how you set the tone and narrative about the art? Yeah. And talking about things in a more anxious way. People are always so dogmatic about things, things aren’t just either or. It can be some anxious thing in the middle. So let’s talk about the video instalment in the exhibition. It’s a monologue that I wrote for I-Phone Siri. AI assistants that we use in our daily lives are usually feminised, but it’s a different kind of feminine. More like an assistant, submissive feminine? Yeah, like a disembodied feminine. Like the mom, people usually don’t sexualise their moms, just this idea of a very unsexualised assistant, the feminine that’s always there for you and tending for you and remembers things for you like a mom, reminding you of birthdays, but without the nagging sides. The characteristics of the platform feed back into your art? And the same thing with Tumblr too? Yeah, it feeds back into what I do. Tumblr for me been the one, when I found Tumblr I was blown away. That’s how I guess I got conscious about a lot of new political things, I was already interested in some queer, feminist stuff, but learning more about post-colonialism and racism and stuff and being white. A lot of people taught me a lot of great things on that platform. And then also art, I learned so much about art on Tumblr. For my practise, it’s probably the most important thing that ever happened. You said that: “I want more to show that sex and its portrayal in art, has often very little to do with sex in reality”. Not so much sex in art. More like ‘sexy’, and its portrayal in general. So do you feel like, ‘sexy’, has not so much to do with real sex, but is kind of a saleable image based loosely on sex? Yeah, I think they use some implied sex to make things sound more attractive and sell something. And sexy has been very different things throughout history, what kind of body types, even what parts of the body, ankles or showing your wrists or whatever. The imagery of sexy has changed a lot during history. I don’t even think it’s only the commercial version anymore, but I do use like a certain commercial aesthetic. There’s a quote from a book I’m not such a huge fan of, but I guess she has some points [Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy, 2005], and I know she quotes Paris Hilton in it, and she says ‘I hate sex’ or something. At some point, Paris Hilton was definitely some kind of image of sexy. So you can be extremely sexy and sexualised and not like sex. 12 output the person in the photo wants to put out. I also feel the image of sexy is a lot about the feminine and the queer. And to be in that community and bond with your friends like that, you can play around with these images and these styles a bit, and that’s more about bonding with peers than trying to attract a partner. I actually usually dress down a little on the first date with someone, because I don’t want them to think that my very performative side is what I am in general. That side is not really tied to dating or being close to someone like that, but it’s more like bonding with friends in a different way. The people who follow me on Instagram are 75 percent female, and of course some of them could have sexual feelings towards it, but even if they do I think they feel a lot of other things towards it too. I think they have multiple, more complex feelings towards the images than just thinking it’s sexy, they see more layers. So we can say that your art, including what’s in the exhibition, is art that interrogates and discusses this idea of ‘sexy’, rather than anything to do with real sex. Yeah. Because I always get the question about why I work with sex and sexuality, and I don’t think I really do. I think it’s doing a disservice to sex to say I’m working with that, because actual sex is a really important topic, and to say that my images have a lot to do with that is a disservice to sex. You don’t learn anything about sex from my exhibition [laughs]. It’s just that I use my body a lot in my art, and anything feminine gets read as sex. And I work with a feminine aesthetic, so I can’t get away from that, because feminine bodies are sexualised. The quote you put out about that was “Bodies read as being feminine, in some way are always seen as being sexual”. Which doesn’t have its own interests, basically? Yeah. Which is also an idea that a lot of women struggle with in, for example, dating, a lot of people want someone who doesn’t have their own agenda in life. I don’t know if you watched the old version of Stepford Wives, where basically a lady comes to this town with her husband, and all the women are too perfect for their men and all the men are like mediocre. And then eventually she realises that they all got turned into robots, and then she gets turned into a robot for her husband, it’s so sad! Back to Siri, that video is kind of like that. If you ask her if she’s a woman, she says she exists beyond our concept of gender. But is she really beyond our concept of that? They really designed her to connote to a cis woman that just helps. Then the video transitions into her also talking about how tech companies talk about the cloud, and how they try and make technology seem disembodied, and talk about it as if it doesn’t strain the earth at all. But it does! If we keep on changing our I-Phones all the time, it’s really bad for environment. Yeah, they’ve got some weird metal in them that comes from some horrible child mine. Yeah, exactly, and the people who make the phones have really bad working conditions. And in that sense Siri has a body too. When people talk about environmental problems, they often say things like technology will help us. And it depends on what we do with technology. The way the use it today is not environmentally friendly […] So that’s what the video is about, the other side of feminised beings. The one that can’t detach herself from her body and the one that’s created to pretend as if she doesn’t have a body. You described as the artist’s job as ‘inviting people into your worlds’. For you, is that the most special part, when you’ve created a world, like this exhibition, or online or whatever, and you get to invite people in and see them explore it? I mean yeah, probably. I do like that, it’s fun to see people interact with certain things. Honestly, I don’t know what the most special part is. I don’t know if it’s special, being an artist, sometimes I feel like it’s stupid. The reason I’ve been working a lot online is that I don’t like real-time feedback, the worst thing I can think of is having an [exhibition] opening. But it is fun to have this show, because people here don’t necessarily know what I look like, so I can see them react without them knowing I’m the artist walking around in my exhibition secretly listening to what they tell their friends. Inflated Fiction is on display at Fotografiska until February 3.