Swedish Girls and Jennry Forsgren link their work to this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners Maria Resa and Dmitry Muratov. They received the award for their efforts to protect freedom of expression, which is a prerequisite for democracy and lasting peace. Through journalism and with lives at stake, they react to the present, search for and find new stories within stories.
“(REACTION VIDEO)” is a video work where the artists filmed and abstracted their own reacting faces. In the physical design, they have taken hold of the chain of reactions and translated it into the form in which the video work is projected. The work is built up through the technique “Mise En Abyme” which in film and literature theory refers to inserting a story into a story.
In effect, they visualize reactions of reactions. With the present as a starting point, they have been inspired by the YouTube phenomenon “Reaction Videos”, where people film themselves while they react to different things – everything from terrible news to newly released music.
This project has been developed within the framework of the Beckmans College of Design Alumni project in collaboration with Nobel Week Lights.
Swedish Girls is an artist collective based in Stockholm that works in the borderland between art and design. It consists of Matilda Ellow, Julia Jondell, Mira Bergh and Josefin Zachrisson. Together, they challenge the normative ways of working and have a conceptual focus. Their projects handle contemporary discussions in order to evoke emotions and create conversations. In addition to the collective, each member has their individual practice.
Jenny Forsgren is an artist in the audiovisual field with a focus on immersive rooms and multisensory experiences. Through installations and projection mapping, she explores the interplay between materiality and digitality, with a special interest in moving bodies. Her creation is based on philosophical concepts and theoretical approaches where the method arises as a consequence of each encounter with a new context.