Liquid Fiction

Online project—exceeding the liquid
Constant innovation never enables a structural base for the living. This project came about as an attempt to investigate further the relation between art and the history of logistics, as it manifests in daily trade as much as in historical, colonial traces. Liquid Fiction departs from the two notions “liquefaction” and “liquidation”—the first referring to a matter being transformed to a liquid (fluid) state, the second to the economic downfall and excessive economization of material life. The last decade it has become increasingly clear that these two notions are connected, and that the prevailing attitude in western late capitalist economy prioritizes algorithms and information flow over land lost to rising waters. In other words, we must deal with both the materiality of fluids and of pixels. This link between materiality and theory also bears connections to the project’s host, the Nordic Watercolour Museum, an art museum in Sweden based around the three connected elements: water, pigment and paper. 

Ever since the Western secularization of art during the enlightenment, art has been viewed as in a conflictual relationship with the concept of life and with the concept of the propriety (product), why the modern conception of art undoubtedly relies on a larger, logistical history that we today see cracking. This is why we need to understand the mediation of art through this interface. Since 2019, Liquid Fiction has invited artists and writers to closely investigate the online manifestation of art not as a distribution of documentation but as an action with consequences. The last part of the project coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic—a fact that brought some of the questions present in the artists’ works to the fore. 

For the first cycle (2019), Olof Marsja (Sweden), Alina Chaiderov (Russia) and eeefff (Belgium/Russia) were artists in resident, followed in the second cycle (2020) by Heba Y. Amin (Egypt), Hanni Kamaly (Norway), Stine Janvin (Norway) and Anna Rún Tryggvadottir (Iceland). Invited writers are Gaby Cepeda (Mexico) and Aleksei Borisionok (Belgium), and a joint textual performance is made public by Stina Nyberg (Sweden), Andros Zins-Browne (United States) and Diederik Peeters (Belgium). Assistant editor was Jasmine Hinks (Sweden) and managing editor and curator was Frida Sandström (Sweden). 

For questions about the project or interviews with participating artists, contact the project manager Frida Sandström or Jonte Nynäs, art educator manager at the Nordic Watercolour Museum.

Frida Sandström, project manager and curator for Liquid Fiction: fvsandstrom [​at​] gmail.com
Jonte Nynäs, art educator manager at the Nordic Watercolour Museum: jonte.nynas [​at​] akvarellmuseet.org