Linnéa Sjöberg “Upwards Through The Ceiling”

baby Company

This event has ended.

A fury of hands and feet encircle a loom’s spinning wheel, harnessed in motion yet quickening out of control. Blurs of bright clashes: mechanism and the softness of sinews amid marbled weaves of pinks, purples, static white. Upward Through The Ceiling, an exhibition of new woven works by Swedish artist Linnéa Sjöberg, is a reclamation of self, and a tangled pursuit to disambiguate body from labor, body from object.

Once a vessel for performative research—career woman, viking weaver, tattoo artist—Sjöberg mercilessly took on new identities, while also deconstructing personal archive and the detritus of memory. A stark departure from these dueling practices, suspended works squarely disembody persona and confront identity from within.

Flanking the dismembering scene of loom and limb, a camouflaged figure—patterned reminder of the slippage between body and backdrop—reaches over to steady or stop the spinning wheel tightly. And while this jumpsuit exists as the thin veil between figure and object, the garment emerges from the tight woven surface, body intact.

Other assemblages in heavy threads, VHS tape, garments and tufts of fur re-orient the body from an extension of the loom to extension of bondage play. The mechanism of labor breaks apart and is replaced by the mechanism of desire. Bodies coiled within the wheel, now in rope and plastic tape; where the mimicry of tension—a tightening of threads, strapped in balance—place pleasure in the ambiguity between body and object.

In a slow percolating foil, sprawling texts ground the body in the visceral and the meditative. Passing spine neck throat head upwards through ceiling. From this centering of self, Sjöberg emerges fully figured. An appliqué of her wardrobe pops out of the sheen of video tape and springing flowers—a crackling of pattern, streaks of bleach, a skirt strung of hand-bound chainmail brought into a belt that reads: PANIK. There is new coherency in the gesture and garment, implicative, frenzied but free. Stomping joyously out of the frame in a return to spirit, Sjöberg finds ease in the anatomy of the present.

LINNÉA SJÖBERG creates work that can be described as performative research, embodying the subject of her interest to the point where no distinction can be made between her art and her persona. After acting as a career woman in a “real-life” performance for almost two years, Sjöberg turned into a tattoo artist named, Salong Flyttkartong. More than strategic decisions, both projects developed in slow and natural processes, and only became discernible as art works over periods of time. The remnants of her actions are documented through text, printed matters, sculptures and textile works.

This is Sjöberg’s first solo exhibition at Company. Other recent shows and projects include those at Belenius, Stockholm; Lundgren Gallery, Mallorca; Bonnier Konsthall, Stockholm; Gussglashalle, Berlin; Modern aMuseet, Stockholm; Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla; Biologiska Museet, Stockholm as well as participation in the 2019 Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art and the 2018 Athens Biennale. Sjöberg was born in 1983 in Sweden and holds an MA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.