Borås Museum of Art, Borås, Sweden.
Photo by Henrik Zeitler.
Tove Kjellmark Swedish, b. 1977
Further images
This video piece was created as an integral part of Tove Kjellmark's solo show at Färgfabriken, Stockholm, October 15–November 27, 2022; extended to March 12, 2023.
The exhibition presents a collection of newly produced works in the form of hybrid sculptures, videos, drawings, and a symbiotic performance in the form of a six-week uninterrupted movement in which the artist draws together with her robots. These works seek the immeasurable, question habitual thought patterns, and reflect on the dissolution of bodily boundaries such as the movement between life and death.
It all starts with a movement. Over time, an unbroken line appears in the room. Impressions that remain after many analog and digital transformations from the encounter with a horse’s physical corporality. Fragments of the horse’s spirit, traces of movement which have solidified and are shaped as physical echoes. Like the feeling of a slowly eroding memory or a life that first comes into being and then fades away, turning into something new.
Tove Kjellmark’s focus and ongoing study is the horse, a being with whom she has a deep emotional bond, as well as the self-constructed robots she works with. Horses and humans have a long shared history where the horse has assumed the role of a robot for human purposes, something that’s still relevant today when many horses must perform well to earn their right to exist. Through her art, Tove Kjellmark shows how our relationship with animals and robots reveals something significant about the anthropocentric view of the world.
”In my work, I search for Another Nature. A nature that refuses to accept a difference between technological and natural forces, between human life and animal life, and between mechanics and organics. By researching precisely these issues, I want to challenge nature, creating it anew. Not out of critique but because this kind of artistic experimentation is the only way another world is revealed.”
The basis for most of the works of art in the exhibition is the pioneering artistic research project that the artist has run for the past three years with support from Kulturbryggan (The Swedish Arts Grants Committee). Through various measurement techniques such as motion capture, 3D scanning, and thermal imaging, the artist has investigated subtle processes in different movement patterns in humans, animals, and robots in an attempt to approach the immeasurable. This is an artistic practice-based exploration of potential new values and sedimentary expressions, sprung from translations between materiality and immateriality through digital, analog, and performative techniques. The digital imprints from the encounter with the horse’s corporality have since been processed by both the artist and self-constructed robots into what has become a kind of hybrid sculpture where new digital technology and traditional materials such as bronze and marble merge.