Project: Foreign Object, 2026

This project consists of sixteen works made through drawing, painting, and sculpture. The materials return to my earlier practice, but the way the work comes into being has changed.

The project grows out of a method I developed in 2023 called Sleeping as a Method. It emerged from meditation practices I used to slow my body during panic attacks. In these moments, I often enter a space between sleep and wakefulness. Perception becomes unstable. Images do not form stories. They appear briefly, shift shape, and dissolve. Forms change into other forms before meaning settles.

In earlier works, I used this state to return directly to memories of war, reconstructing scenes of violence and bombardment as fragmented visual environments tied to specific places and events. In this exhibition, the method remains, but the focus has shifted. The work is no longer aimed at reconstructing the past, but at working within the present.

The landscapes in these works are real places. They are not imagined or symbolic settings. They appear stable, familiar, and continuous. Into these landscapes, dense geometric forms are introduced. These forms are not representations of remembered objects. They exist as solid presences that interrupt space, perspective, and visual order. I understand them as foreign objects.

These objects do not adapt to the landscapes they enter. They disrupt them. They block views, cut through space, and resist integration. They do not explain themselves or turn into symbols. This refusal is central to the work. The aim is not to smooth the experience or make it legible, but to allow the disruption to remain visible.

I recognize myself in this disruption, not as a metaphor but as a structure. My presence often alters how spaces function, simply by being there. The object does not ask to belong. It changes how the landscape is read.

This position extends across my life and relationships, shaping how I move through social and institutional spaces that are calibrated for recognition, clarity, and assimilation. The landscapes do not collapse. They continue to exist. But they are permanently altered by the presence of the foreign object.

The exhibition is not about trauma as a single event. It is about estrangement as an ongoing condition. Sleeping as a Method becomes a way of staying with disorientation without forcing resolution, and without translating experience into narrative or explanation.

The project is supported by Göteborg City.