A scent of pine and a gnawing creak reached me even before I stepped down into Goldin+Senneby’s exhibition at Accelerator. The sound came from small machines – miniature insects of sorts – placed throughout the subterranean gallery, housed in a former particle physics laboratory at Stockholm University. Together, they formed a chorus of rhythmic noise, like a creaky old bed uncomfortably groaning every time you try to settle in. There’s something that chafes, that hurts, that refuses to be ignored.
The contraptions are built from Lego and kept shaking a phone, causing its step counter to tick upwards. The number 24,578 displayed on one of the screens, and I immediately thought about how I myself hadn’t reached my goal of 10,000 steps for the day. As a health fanatic, I obsessively seek quantifiable data as a way to gain control over my chronically ill body. I laughed out loud at the pragmatic solution here. The exhibition brochure explains that the robots were built after instructions from a patient forum on You Tube; they’re designed to trick step counters, thereby bypassing insurance companies’ requirements for shared health data.
One of these tiny robots sits on a wooden bridge that stretches across a hard amber-coloured resin lake in one of the larger rooms. This immersive, monumental gesture recalls Olafur Eliasson’s River Bed (2014) or Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977), in the way it forces nature into the gallery. In another part of the exhibition, I moved through a forest of trunk-like aroma diffusers that release pheromonal vapour into the air. There was no room for contemplation. Instead, the organism that is me became part of the exhibition’s greater ecosystem.
Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby have formed a duo for over twenty years, and Flare-Up revolves around Senneby’s illness, multiple sclerosis (MS), which often manifests in flare-ups that can last from days to months. As always with Goldin+Senneby, the exhibition is a complex web of interwoven references, creating a kind of evidence board where red threads connect different phenomena and events.
The piece Multiple Scars (2021) comprises a series of frottages and a resin cast of the herringbone-patterned scars that appear on pine trees when they’re tapped for resin. On the one hand, the spine-like appearance of the work references the disease itself, where the body’s immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, leading to inflammation, scarring, and disruptions in nerve signals. On the other hand, it serves as an aggressive image of the war waged on nature by industrial society – where, as we learn from the exhibition text, resin has played a key role in the shipbuilding industry since the 17th century.
Autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and multiple sclerosis have increased significantly in recent decades, particularly in Western societies. This trend, according to both conspiracy theorists and serious researchers, is believed to be caused by the microplastics, chemicals, and toxins to which we are constantly exposed. All these aspects are elegantly interwoven in the work, making the exhibition a powerful analogy for a body – and a society – at war with itself.
To some extent, viewers must read their way to the ‘right’ answers by browsing the exhibition booklet, which presents refined references and the extensive research underlying the conceptual pieces. Those who wish to read further can turn to the American writer Katie Kitamura, who has collaborated with Goldin+Senneby on a literary work available for visitors to take home. In it, we follow J, who hopes to receive treatment for his illness through an experimental clinical trial (for which he must be just sick enough to qualify), a woman wrestling guilt over conducting Zoom lectures for a pharmaceutical company, and a mysterious pine tree that unexpectedly arrives in the mail.
Although the exhibition is text-heavy and the brochure serves as an interpretation manual, Kitamura’s story is a fantastic way of introducing warmth among the coolly conceptual objects – and surely there’s more simmering beneath the surface of the exhibition than what’s laid out in press releases and work descriptions. Beneath the chemically magnetic smoke screens and dim lighting, a mysticism lingers – hinting at the enigmatic nature of systems, where minor disturbances in one place set off imbalances that manifest as illness elsewhere.
On one of the walls hangs a series of murky plastic sheets that look as though someone had vomited on them. It is an explosive form of action painting that’s supposed to reference climate protests where activists have thrown soup at paintings. At the same time, the yellow, red, and blue-translucent sludge makes me think of bile, blood, and phlegm – bodily fluids which, according to medieval humoral pathology, could cause both illness and unstable personalities when out of balance.
In Swallowimage (2025), the duo has cultivated the immunosuppressive fungus Isaria sinclairii on the backs of old paintings featuring dramatic depictions of death and disease. The fungus has the ability to suppress immune system activity and has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries, only to be patented and packaged into pill form as a treatment for MS in the 20th century. The paintings stand out in a right angle from the wall, with the mould fungus creating living fuzzy blooms on the backs. It’s beautiful, imbued with superstition, and, at the same time, a subversive gesture – both in meaning and form – against the Western world’s coldly clinical belief in its own research as the only rational and correct knowledge. Here, nature lives, breathes, and operates beyond our understanding.
The exhibition’s most beautiful work, Crying Pine (2025), features a frail little tree encased in a block of resin illuminated from behind. The tree was genetically modified to overproduce resin – its natural defense against pests and pathogens – in an effort to extract the substance as a renewable fuel alternative. But the modification backfired, putting the tree at risk of poisoning itself with its own protective toxins. It’s yet another striking example of how humanity meddles with a magic whose consequences we cannot always foresee.
Flare-Up portrays, in an ultra-sophisticated way, the interconnectedness of systems large and small. It’s a deeply tangible insight for those who suffer from an autoimmune disease, but also a societal reality in a world of flaming forests as a direct consequence of industrial society’s impact on the climate. Goldin+Senneby masterfully demonstrate art’s ability to build associative worlds capable of juggling multiple narratives at once. Yet beneath all the meticulous research lies something deeply sorrowful – a desperate search for control. The relentless pursuit of answers becomes, in itself, a way for two friends to process the pain of MS, a disease that is chronic, irreversible, and ultimately uncontrollable. “In some ways, the hardest part of this ordeal – and I don’t use that word lightly – has been losing control,” says J in Kitamura’s book. The little pine tree drenched in resin, I can’t help but think, is an image of Jakob Senneby himself.
