I stopped knowing and started looking instead​

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Installation of moving images, living sculptures & soundscape.

Video projection, steel, glass, wood, pond water, digestive track recordings and living organisms.

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In this solo exhibition, Julie Sjöfn follows her curiosity about the living world through an art practice that blends different media and disciplines. Her works play with a loss of agency from the artist and are replaced by cooperation between other beings and herself. This exhibition acts as a slow experimental station that aims to open conversations and connections with the living beings that we share the world with.

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I was once, one of the beings that inhabited the ocean, that my mother’s body is. 

For about 6570 hours, she incubated me. 

In this flesh vessel that our bodies are, all sorts of life grow, co-habit, and co-operate.

In the laboratory that my studio is, I attempt to listen to the voices that I have ignored for as long as I have lived. 

Asking Nature to be my teacher; cooperating with other living beings.

As I learn to embrace it, it challenges my sense of time, self, and overall understanding of what surrounds me. 

“What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn’t you dance it? Wouldn’t you act it out? Wouldn’t your every movement tell the story? In time you would become so eloquent that just a gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives.”  

Robin Wall Kimmerer 

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Every unanswered question may stay unanswered, all while carrying value at its core. To not dismiss the things we do not yet understand, but instead embrace a state of not-knowing; because this is the birthplace of new knowledge.

 

Water is a thread that weaves life into being. 

It flows from one body to another, it ties the mountain to the sea-through rivers. And as it leaks from one work to the next, it invites your mind to float toward thinking with- rather than about."

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