Johanna Oskarsson (SE)

© Johanna Oskarsson Johanna Oskarsson (b.1989 in Umeå) is a Swedish artist. She holds an MFA in fine art and a BFA in textile art from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, where she also lives. 

Johanna’s practice is based in the visual aesthetics that is a darkening echo of the subcultures of post-punk and the industrial scene of the 80’s. Techniques she works in are drawing, film and digital jacquard weaving. Weaving as a method is always present in her works, a constant looking and going back and forth with the material being essential in the process. The thought is the warp and the material that is aligned into it is the weft, and together they make up the fabric or work that is being produced.  In a transdisciplinary approach, she combines a craft-based practice with an artistic research approach to historical materialism. When she works on themes like the exploitation and erotisation of nature and human bodies by capitalism, something which is always present is the way we look at the natural world as something to consume. Recently she has turned towards looking at the cross-breeding between neo-liberalism and neo-fascism that is going on in the countries of Europe at the moment.
She is inspired by Deleuze & Guatarri’s thoughts on the lack of resistance to the now and the overflowing of communication as well as Mark Fisher's thoughts of hauntology and the desire for a past that might have never existed because we can't stand the present. Other artists she finds interesting include Pier Paolo Pasolini, Caspar David Friedrich, Andrej Tarkovskij, Hannah Ryggen and the band Einstürzende Neubauten.

During her stay in Leipzig she will work on a project around the proletarian socialist weightlifting clubs that were present in Germany in the 1920s -1930s before the Nazis seized power and forbid them. The clubs were strongly connected to political ideas and considered sports as a part of society and politics. They believed that the bourgeois society used sports as a means to lure the workers away from the class struggles and to teach them the values of capitalism, competition, individualism and breaking records. The project is also about how weightlifting went from something belonging to the working class to becoming the individualistic building of the neo-liberal sculpted body that has developed into a multibillion industry.

Johanna Oskarsson