Avesta Art 2026
Har stängt för säsongen
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.
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 forcontemporary art exhibitions.
Participating artists
Selma Selman (f. 1991, Bosnien och Hercegovina) Selma Selman (b. 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is an artist of Romani heritage working with performance, video, sculpture, and installation. Her practice often takes its point of departure in her family’s work with scrap metal recycling and the experiences of living within a marginalized Romani context. Through this, she examines issues 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 in their work. They create immersive pieces that navigate the intersections of performance, installation, and choreography, where time, movement, and physical presence are central. In their practice, the human body is used as a medium to investigate the 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.
Homepage: https://www.dianaorving.com/
Tuomas A. Laitinen (b. 1976, FI) is an artist based in Helsinki. He works with moving images, sound, light, glass, as well as chemical and biological processes, examining how nature, technology, and energy are interconnected in constantly changing systems. At Avesta Art, the work The Earth is the Ear of the Bear is being presented, The Earth is the Ear of the Bear, which consists of sound, video, and sculpture.
The work takes its point of departure in environments and listening, and is inspired by Norse mythology. By combining myth, perception, and material processes, Laitinen explores how landscapes and surroundings can be perceived as active and sentient rather than as passive backgrounds.
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. He works primarily with sculpture, investigating how form, function, and aesthetics are utilized within systems concerning 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 a Stockholm-based artist. She works with installation, sculpture, film, and sound, often using materials that carry traces of labor, production, and previous use. At Avesta Art, the work Beyond Signals II is exhibited 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/
What is Avesta Art?
Konstsamlingen
Runt om i Verket finns permanenta konstverk och installationer som blivit en naturlig del av den historiska industrimiljön. De flesta skapades för Avesta Art och har bevarats på platsen. Tillsammans skapar de en unik dialog mellan samtidskonst, industrihistoria och arkitektur.
