Paula Tove Alderin Swedish, b. 1971

Paula Tove Alderin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores rawness, the liminal, and instability as indeterminate, porous zones of transformation, bringing together visual art and performative actions, navigating the boundaries of language, matter, and embodied experience. She engages with rawness, becoming and destruction, the not-yet-formed, through the lenses of philosophy and belief systems. In recent years, she has increasingly engaged with the political dimensions of these concepts. Her work is shown as expanded painting, sculpture, collage, light, and sitespecific installations.

Drawing from early experiences shaped by flesh and spirit, rawness and beauty, shame, and other realities than the apparent, her work probes thresholds of space and concept. Weaving together existential events and contemporary upheavals, at the frontier of human potential and experience. Her work also draws from resistance against erasure in a world increasingly marked by disembodiment and political urgency.

“What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” (Harold Rosenberg, ARTnews,

1952)

Ritual often serves as a space to evoke presence and hold space for reflection. Through various acts and iterations - blowing, hauling, decaying, surrendering - she explores how body and materiality, as a site of experience and confrontation, can render the formless, incorporeal, and the unimaginable into palpable being. In a mediating act that holds time, connecting the personal and the collective, calling forth memory and the raw potential at the emerging edge of experience. 

Her actions take form in an interplay between the intelligible and the obscure, the existent and the insistent, the remnants and the lamented, through personally or culturally charged materials that act as bearers of their own meaning or serve as vessels for ideas and notions, open in intention. Her work moves between the poles of reductive restraint and expressive gesture, a tension often thought of as conflict. Yet it is in this in-between zone that she finds the restless space of flux and stillness, presence and absences, proximity and distance. 

Seeking to hold both in a state of instability, openness, as she follows what surfaces in the nature of becoming and in the shadow of destruction.

“But what remains after an act has ended? What are the obligations of a witness to an act that is over? These questions are thoroughly theatrical and performative, but they are also intimate and ethical”  (Peggy Phelan, Lessons in Blindness, PMLA, 2004).

Weaving together timeless existential events and contemporary upheavals, she uses her canvas as an arena on which to act, unfolding horizons of rawness. It may seem abstract, but each gesture draws a scenario, a place of being and becoming, inviting risk and vulnerability. By exploring the ephemeral, that which resists all attempts of fixation, she turns her gaze to the now, the immediacy of flux, but also to what is lost and what lingers. It is in these remains that she invites us to embrace the wonder that lies within the liminal spaces that connect us all, to reflect over the fragile boundaries of existence and to rest in instability, as we forge new imaginaries. Something so close and yet so absolutely remote.  

Whatever else, it is a drama of appearance, a space where the transient is both enacted and witnessed.

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Paula Tove Alderin (b.1971) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, holding a Postmaster of Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, (2022–2023) and a Master of Fine Arts from The Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen (2000). In 2024, she studied at the Department of Theology at Uppsala University (Beauty, Humour and Pleasure in the Shadow of the Bomb) and at Valand / HDK in Gothenburg (Methods of Writing within Artistic Practice) Additionally, she holds a Bachelor in Art History.