Nik Kosmas, Innocence Crisis, Censorship Bureau, Stockholm
If 2023 was the year of galleries, 2024 has been the year of the mysterious micro-galleries. Think of Beau Travail, Strändernas Svall, cues.cx, Galleri Bäckahästen, Antics, or Frankfurt. Don’t know half of these? Exactly. Another addition to Stockholm’s underground gallery scene is Censorship Bureau. Rumor has it the gallery is managed by a mysterious collector from China who curates the exhibitions via video calls. The hyper-trendy international program featured artists such as Eliza Douglas, Cumwizard69420 and Julian-Jakob Kneer. Most recently Nik Kosmas’s polished, spectacular little exhibition featured muscular 3D-printed figures with both breasts and penises, colorful airbrush paintings, and a perfectly crafted aluminum rose. It was fun, BB9-nostalgic and pulsated with erotic energy.
Lina Lundquist, Shutter, Galleri Mejan, Stockholm
Intensified by four fluorescent tubes, Lina Lundquist’s graduation show at the Royal Institute of Art was as blindingly sterile like an operating theater. On a screen, the pixelated grin of the Cheshire Cat glimmered against a black void, while the sound of a robot hand with red fake nails drumming its fingers on a glass pane clattered in the background. A facial toning mask designed to tighten the skin through electrical impulses resembled a futuristic torture device as it spun slowly on a podium. Lundquist evoked a clinical surrealism, drawing me to the surgically precise objects, while letting an unspoken threat hang in the air: What if my own body was forced into this Frankenstein-esque beauty project, throwing me into a nightmare à la Pedro Almodóvar’s plastic surgery-thriller This Skin I Live In (2011)?
Dylan Aiello and Rosa Aiello, LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising, performance, Mint, Stockholm
One of the highlights of the year took place at the art festival September Sessions. During an intense hour-long performance by the sibling duo Dylan Aiello and Rosa Aiello, the audience at Mint witnessed art dissolve into reality in a fantastically campy magic trick. Sitting in the front row, I felt both terrified, utterly fooled, and in on the joke as the super-charismatic Dylan Aiello splashed blood all over my shoes and looked me straight in the eye to say, “it’s real life in here.” The brilliance of the performance lay in its ability to seamlessly move back and forth between the front and backstage, ultimately breaking into real life by playing with roles such as actor, director, sister, brother, victim, and perpetrator.
Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl is an art critic and a founding editor of Nuda, a biannual journal exploring art, fashion, design and philosophy. She is a regular contributor to Kunstkritikk.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
