Madeleine Aleman, Parasto Backman och Lilian Steiner

Opening reception: 22/8, 1–4 pm
Curators: Ashik Zaman (Artistic Director, SKF) and Yuvinka Medina (Artistic Director, Gävle Konstcentrum)

An artist talk with Madeleine Aleman, Parasto Backman and Lilian Steiner, moderated by curators Ashik Zaman and Yuvinka Medina, will take place on Thursday 27 August, 6–7 pm.

Undying revolves around how art can attempt to give form to that which is difficult to define, verify, or explain through rational means. Undying departs from the human desire to establish and sustain connections with what is no longer present: the dead, lost languages and forms of communication, bodily memories and accumulated physical experiences that are fleeting, and sensations that elude rational understanding.

In the making of the exhibition, questions around how art can give form to that which is difficult to define, verify, or explain, have been a focal point. Making becomes a way of listening, remembering, recalling, and tending to what might otherwise be lost. As such art emerges not as representation, but as a practice through which connections can be sustained, negotiated, and transformed.

In Madeleine Aleman’s practice, the works begin taking shape through inner journeys, where encounters with figures beyond the tangible visible world become a driving force for image-making. Whatever form they take, her practice is rooted in active imagination, a method developed by psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung as a way of entering a hypnagogic state between wakefulness and dreaming. Aleman’s lifelong interest in Depth psychology and esotericism also draw on night dreams and divination through the Chinese oracle I Ching as important sources of inspiration.

For Undying, she has worked in close dialogue with her grandfather, Jack Hårdstedt, as well as the artists Gösta Adrian-Nilsson and Nils Dardel. Through encounters with their spirits, she has engaged in conversations about artistic practice, queerness, and spiritual search. The works have been made directly after these sessions, when she intuitively allows the energy generated through these encounters to take visual form, either in ink on paper or oil on canvas. For Aleman, image-making becomes a way of making visible connections that extend beyond the visible world, translating inner encounters into images.

Parasto Backman takes interest in language and inheritance as notions through which to explore migration, memory, and loss. Her work in Undying, which she describes as a play with diasporic language, departs from Nastaliq, a historic Iranian form of calligraphy that has become, for Backman, a way of approaching languages, cultural heritage, and traditions and knowledge at risk of being lost. The work emerged following the death of her father and has developed as a way of processing grief through writing, gesture, and embodied experience.

Drawing on this tradition, Backman develops a visual and bodily language of her own, in which the lines of writing gradually loosen themselves from their original context. Through shifts, repetitions, and movement, they are transformed into expressions that carry traces of both inheritance and loss. Her work moves between the material and embodied dimensions of language, exploring how meanings change as they are carried across generations, geographies, and cultural contexts. For Backman, language and movement become tools for working through sustaining connections across time, place, and generations.

In Lilian Steiner’s work, which emerges from movement and choreography, the dancing body appears as an archive of memory and transformation. Through sweat—the body’s most direct trace of labour, repetition, and dedication—she explores how the experiences of dance can be preserved beyond the fleeting moment. Referencing Chinese traditions in which paper representations of objects, such as ”joss paper,” are burned to send gifts to deceased relatives and ancestors, Steiner imagines how, as a dancer, she might gift herself in her next life, the unique wealth of dance she has acquired in this one. In her work the body becomes both a carrier of accumulated knowledge and a ritual medium through which labour, presence, and transience are transformed into something that can continue to exist beyond life itself.

Undying is presented in two versions, at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm and at Gävle Konstcentrum. The works move between and are reconfigured in response to the two distinct locations, making the exhibition format itself part of the exhibition’s thematic approach to continuation and transformation.

In addition to her participation in this group exhibition, Lilian Steiner is SKF/Konstnärshuset’s artist-in-residence 2026, presenting three choreographic works at SKF/Konstnärshuset throughout the year. The first was presented in collaboration with the fifth edition of the dance festival STHLM Dans.