Avesta Art 2026
Earthly Bodies Born of Love May 23 – September 20
Earthly Bodies Born of Love is a group exhibition where eight international and Swedish artists connect Avesta's industrial past with today's digital systems. Spanning installations, sound, video games, and moving images, the works demonstrate how contemporary modes of production and daily life shape the world around us.
Participating artists
Selma Selman (b. 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is an artist of Romani heritage whose work spans performance, video, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is often rooted in her family's scrap metal recycling business and the experiences of living within a marginalized Romani community. Through this lens, she explores themes of value, labor, gender, identity, and resistance.
A video version of the work Motherboards is on display at Avesta Art. Motherboards.
In the work, Selman makes visible the connections between technological waste, physical labor, and economic systems. Motherboards relates to the exhibition's theme by showing how both industrial and digital systems are built on extraction, recycling, and invisible labor—and how these systems have concrete consequences for people and their living conditions.
Selma Selman holds a Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the University of Banja Luka and a Master’s degree from Syracuse University. She is also the founder of the organization Get The Heck To School, which supports the education of Romani girls facing social exclusion and poverty.
Homepage: https://www.selmanselma.com/
Lundahl & Seitl are artistic partners both in life and work. They create immersive projects that move between performance, installation, and choreography, centering on time, movement, and embodied presence. In their practice, the human body is used as a medium to investigate relationships between body, landscape, and ecosystem.
At Avesta Art, the work River Biographies, which takes its starting point in rivers as carriers of memory, movement, and change.
The work examines how human bodies and natural systems are intertwined, and how landscapes can be understood as something living and fluid rather than static.
Lundahl & Seitl have exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Gropius Bau in Berlin, Accelerator in Stockholm, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. They also participated in documenta 15 with the commissioned work Echoes of Alternative Histories and received the Performance Art Prize at the Karachi Biennale KB24.
Diana Orving (b. 1985, Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm. She works with textile sculptures and painting, investigating how memories, emotions, and bodily experiences can take shape in material form. In her work, fabric and stitching are treated as something living, where movements and shifts make otherwise invisible processes visible.
Orving’s work moves between different states, such as tension and dissolution, stillness and change. By working on a large scale with soft materials, she explores how form can carry traces of time, motion, and inner transformation.
Orving has exhibited both in Sweden and internationally, including at Millesgården, Liljevalchs, and Artipelag in Stockholm, as well as Galleri Arnstedt, the Gothenburg Museum of Art, and Varberg Konsthall.
Homepage: https://www.dianaorving.com/
Tuomas A. Laitinen (b. 1976, FI) is an artist based in Helsinki. Working with moving images, sound, light, glass, as well as chemical and biological processes, he explores how nature, technology, and energy interconnect in ever-changing systems. At Avesta Art, the work The Earth is the Ear of the Bear, which consists of sound, video, and sculpture.
The title The Earth is the Ear of the Bear is inspired by Roberto Calasso’s The Celestial Hunter (2016). In the book, the bear is described as a being between human and animal, closely attuned to its surroundings.
Through video and spatial sound, the work explores relationships between body, environment, and listening. Here, nature is not presented as a passive backdrop, but as something active, alive, and in constant relation to us.
Laitinen studied at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and has exhibited at venues such as the Helsinki Biennial, Kiasma, Amos Rex, and ZKM Karlsruhe.
Homepage: http://www.tuomasalaitinen.com/
Oleksandr Kutovyi (b. 1983, Ukraine) is an artist based in Milan. Working primarily in sculpture, he explores how form, function, and aesthetics are utilized within systems of power, control, and violence.
His work often takes its starting point in industrial and architectural expressions that, at first glance, may appear neutral or rational.
Kutovyi trained in monumental sculpture at the Odessa Art School and the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. In his sculptures, he deconstructs and reinterprets forms associated with order, efficiency, and governance, showing how such visual languages can conceal the consequences they have for bodies, labor, and societies. Earthly Bodies Born of Love In Earthly Bodies Born of Love, this is linked to the exhibition’s broader questions regarding industrial heritage and the systems that continue to shape our lives today.
Theresa Traore Dahlberg (b. 1983, Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm. Working with installation, sculpture, film, and sound, she often takes her starting point from materials that bear traces of labor, production, and previous use. At Avesta Art, the work Beyond Signals IIis presented, in which parts from 3G and 4G base stations are formed into new objects. The work makes visible how technical systems and communication affect landscapes and bodies, even when they are perceived as invisible.
Theresa Traore Dahlberg studied at The New School in New York, holds a Bachelor’s degree from Stockholm University of the Arts, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Liljevalchs Konsthall and the Helsinki Biennial.
Homepage: https://theresatraoredahlberg.com/
Alice Bucknell (b. 1993, USA) is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. They work with video games and video to explore how technology, humans, and the environment interconnect. Avesta Art features the interactive video game Small Void and the video Ground Truthing. Bucknell's work utilizes play and gaming to demonstrate how our ways of understanding the world are shaped by digital systems—and how these systems affect both our bodies and our surroundings..
Recently completed and upcoming exhibitions include Nightcrawlers at Centre Pompidou, Soft Robots at Copenhagen Contemporary, and Almost Unreal at the MUNCH Oslo Triennial. Other Intelligences at HEK, The Solar Biennial at MUDAC, and Kunsthalle Praha. Previous exhibitions and collaborations include projects with Serpentine, the Venice Biennale Frieze x Getty PST, and the Los Angeles Public Library.
Homepage: https://alicebucknell.com/
Historically, Avesta has been, and remains, an important site for iron and steel production. Today, we live in an economy where data and information are the new raw materials. The exhibition uses this very location to show how these two systems interconnect—and how both affect living organisms, the climate, and consequently, our culture and societies. Through installations, sculpture, video, sound, and video games, the artists demonstrate how technology, labor, and human choices shape the world around us, creating an experience where Avesta's industrial past meets contemporary art. Artists from the USA, Finland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine, and Sweden gather in Avesta for a group exhibition exploring bodies, labor, technology, and the future.
Programmet rymmer flera sverigepremiärer och internationellt uppmärksammade works—ranging from Alice Bucknell's video games and Selma Selman's video works, to site-specific and interactive performances by Lundahl & Seitl, and large-scale installations by Diana Orving and Tuomas A. Laitinen—as well as an opening reception with a live concert.
About Avesta Art
Founded in 1995, Avesta Art has since become an important summer exhibition for the city. Each year, Verket—the old 19th-century ironworks—is transformed into a venue for contemporary art exhibitions.
This Year's Curators
Karolina Aastrup (b. 1980, Sweden) is a curator based in Stockholm. In her practice, she is interested in how contemporary art can shed light on issues of technology, climate, and societal change. She She has served as artistic director for Triennalen Västernorrland, worked as a curator at Västernorrlands museum, and is currently a curator at Sörmlands museum. In her projects, she often works closely with artists and sites, focusing on how art can generate new ways of understanding our contemporary world.
Sona Stepanyan (b. 1987, Armenia) is a Stockholm-based freelance curator currently collaborating with the Swedish Curators Association, MDT, and Södertälje konsthall, where her most recent exhibition ran until February 2026. Her international curatorial practice emphasizes diverse artistic expressions and in-depth, context-based thinking through research, exhibitions, and public programming.
For general inquiries regarding this year's exhibition, please contact the curators, Karolina Aastrup, lina.aastrup@gmail.com
Press Contacts contact@partprojects.se
What is Avesta Art?
Permanent art in Verket
I Verket finns ett flertal fasta konstverk och installationer. De finns i olika skepnader, utformningar och material. De flesta har kommit på plats genom ett Avesta Art år, och blivit kvar därefter. Andra har hittat hem i de suggestiva lokalerna på annat sätt. Samtliga installationer är på ett sätt eller annat helt integrerade i miljön.
