Maria Bonnier Dahlin Grant recipients 2021 / Artists’ Film International

Bonniers Konsthall is proud to announce the opening of The Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation grant recipients 2021 and Artists’ Film International.

Every year, the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation awards grants to young Swedish artists to support their work. The 2021 grants are awarded to Tobias Bradford and Ferdinand Evaldsson. Both artists share an interest in psychology, memory and fears, which they process using various crafts techniques. In their studios, the two artists engage in time-consuming work, carving, moulding and painting motifs in materials such as wood, gelatine and papier-mâché. The physical and tactile processes, where hand meets material in the studio, are transferred to the exhibition space, where Bradford’s mobile sculptural installations meet Evaldsson’s pigmented wood panels. 

Tobias Bradford (b. 1993) borrows concepts from puppetry, illusionism and robotics. With moving and sounding sculptures, he explores the relationship between body and machine, with the interplay of human desires and technological progress as a pervading theme. His works are often self-portraits in the form of mechanised body parts and musical instruments. In repetitive patterns, the sculptures manifest childhood memories but also various obsessions and compulsive thoughts. The mechanisms of Bradford’s sculptures are always openly revealed and intentionally look like simple DIY jobs. In this way, he illustrates the fragility of both bodies and technology. 

Ferdinand Evaldsson’s (b. 1988) imagery is linked to a personal amnesia and can be read as a monument to the struggle to regain control over something lost. With a background in icon painting, he combines a traditional craft with a contemporary expression where he mills and carves symbols and motifs into wood panels. The reliefs are made in both large and small formats which are then pigmented and polished with saliva or lined with brass sheets. As the artist voyages through his own personal memories, he combines them with the collective memory in relation to the traditional craft of icon painting. 

Both Evaldsson and Bradford explore memory in their art, with materials that are perpetually in motion. Together they portray feelings such as love and fear, using craft technique as a means of grasping what is truly ungraspable. 

Artists’ Film International is a network of art institutions from around the world, first established in 2008 by the Whitechapel Gallery, London. From a selected theme, each participating institution chooses a film from an emerging artist. The theme for 2021 is “Care”. Bonniers Konsthall has invited Victoria Verseau (b. 1988) to participate with her work Approaching a Ghost (2021). This year, for the first time, Bonniers Konsthall shows all films in a group exhibition where Verseau’s work Approaching a Ghost is presented as a large-scale installation. Verseau works in a variety of media ranging from moving image to sculpture, installation and performance. Her artistic practice focuses on examinations of body, identity, and social structures. Her work also has points of contact with philosophy and spirituality. Personal experiences of being a trans and new woman often provide a starting point. Based on her own story, she strives to process existential issues; who we are, who we want to be and the meaning of life.  Approaching a Ghost is Verseau’s attempt to capture and care for the memory of her late friend Meril. She and Meril met in Thailand when they were preparing to undergo gender confirmation surgery. During a period marked by anxiety about an uncertain future, they found support in each other.

The film depicts abandoned places such as the now worn-down hospital where the artist and Meril underwent their surgery, the quiet hotel where they recovered afterwards and the tidal lands on the outskirts of the city. A whispering voice tells of places, friends and distant memories that are evoked like ghosts. The film interacts with a number of sculptural objects in the room, such as argon sculptures (neon), casts of dilators, metal shavings of spent hormone tablet strips – objects that in various ways refer to the transition from boy to woman. Approaching a Ghost seeks to portray a place beyond time, a suspended spatiality that hovers between life and death.