Bisedë artistike me artisten Saskia Holmkvist te ZETA Contemporary Art Center

Artist Talk
Saskia Holmkvist

28.08.2025, 19:00
ZETA Contemporary Art Center

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At ZETA Center, Saskia Holmkvist will present recent film and performance work, which filters through a mode of working she calls Back Translation. This entails revisiting sources through events and performances of other artists’ works, relating them to the complex history and ideology, and forming new alliances in renegotiating a past with the present. The historical timespan is tightly connected to her own lifetime through memory and performance, as a fragile material that enables renegotiation and connection. She works in a circular mode, bringing together themes of historic erasure and limits of translation through critical listening, oral speculation, and repetition into works that build on dialogues between performance and film installation.

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Saskia Holmkvist is an artist based in Stockholm. She is also a professor of fine arts at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. For over two decades, Holmkvist has worked using video, performance, and text alongside new approaches to relational work and oral archives that encompass critical listening, speculation, and performative translation. She has a particular focus on contemporary history, translation processes, and ethics.

Holmkvist´s practice is concerned with the limits of translation, exploring how new interactions can reshape relations and historical trajectories. Her work combines aspects of ethnography and theatre to create films and performances that relate through past artworks, language, and political movements. This serves as a source from which she abstracts to speak back through gestures, staged scenes, documentary elements, and sonics into the newly mediated narrative memories that form the aesthetic and theoretical fabric of her practice.