Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up

Accelerator presents the solo exhibition Flare-Up by the artist duo Goldin+Senneby. The exhibition continues the duo’s multi-year focus on autoimmunity, accessibility and ecology. Most works are created for the exhibition, including several influenced by their long-term collaboration with fiction writer Katie Kitamura.

Drawing on the artist’s experience of living with multiple sclerosis (MS), the exhibition title, Flare-Up, refers to a treatable aspect of the disease. While the gradual progression of the condition offers limited options for intervention, the sudden flare-ups have attracted significant interest from the pharmaceutical industry, paving the way for lucrative treatments. Flare-Up also alludes to the volatile and inflammable nature of terpenes in pine resin, which has sparked investment in genetically engineered pines as a potential source of green energy.

Since 2018, Goldin+Senneby has collaborated with Katie Kitamura, blending their artistic practice with her narrative craft to explore themes of autoimmunity—the fraught notion of a body at war with itself—and the stakes of reengineering life to defend against biological or environmental peril. Flare-Up is also the working title of a novel composed of two discrete parts set in parallel versions of the same world. One part centres on a mysterious pine tree with a supercharged immune system, while the other follows a stranger whose identity and biological coherence are called into question as he searches for a groundbreaking treatment for his illness.

Goldin+Senneby’s research, experiments, and performances have inspired Kitamura’s fiction, which, in turn, has influenced the duo’s artistic output. Flare-Up brings this multifaceted body of work together for the first time, culminating ahead of the novel’s publication, produced and edited by Triple Canopy.

As an exhibition space operated by Stockholm University, Accelerator has a particular interest in the relationship between art and science, exploring how the two fields can inform one another. In addition to organising a public programme that engages with researchers at the university, this focus has sparked a dialogue with the Anthropocene Laboratory at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Goldin+Senneby was invited to participate in research initiatives within the lab, leading to a series of works titled ‘After Landscape’, which reconstruct the protective glass in front of famous landscape paintings that were subjected to climate protests. Unlike the iconoclasms of previous centuries, these actions have not impacted the paintings themselves, but stopped at the protective glass, also referred to as the ‘climate frame’.

After Accelerator, a version of Flare-Up will be exhibited at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA, in the fall of 2025.