Online Art Talk, Video Screening and Studio Visit with Iris Smeds

Welcome to our next Online Art Talk, in which we will visit artist Iris Smeds in her studio and hear about her video work Surreal Strategies to Apply on a Disillusioned Landscape – which departs from a state of mind some of us might recognise right now. Watch the live stream on Wednesday 15 April at 12.00 CET on SSE Art Initiative's Facebook page.

Iris Smeds, born 1984, lives and works in Stockholm. Through text, film, sculpture and performance, her work explores issues of economics, the value of art, the individual's marketability and the boundaries between art and entertainment. Smeds has exhibited at Växjö Konsthall, Stefan Karlsson's Museum of Bad Art, Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Wetterling Gallery and Gothenburg Art Hall, among others. 

In 2018, she received grants from both the Swedish Film Institute and the Artists' Committee for her film project The Average, which premiered during the Gothenburg film festival in 2019. She is currently working on her upcoming project The Little House in The Food Court, a film about a queer theater group setting up a cabaret based on the American television series Little House on the Prairie.

The video work Surreal strategies to apply on a disillusioned landscape was created in 2016 to explore if you could use surrealism as a way to describe a society that is becoming increasingly absurd. The work is part of the project The unsold dream and the starting point was the surrealistic and physical feeling of emptiness and disillusionment born out of the market economy adjustments to our society. 

The film describes a depressive and passive state where one is merely watching the world be redeemed through its crises. Where one does not actively tackle the change of the world, but instead manages one's sense of helplessness by lying on the threshold in a cocoon, narrating an unsellable dream. The work was shown at the group exhibition Werewolf! at the Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen 2016. 

Iris Smeds is one of the 2019 recipients of the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation grant. Stockholm School of Economics is proud to exhibit a number of earlier recipients' artworks, which are on loan from the foundation and being displayed in the Bonnier Staircases. Surreal strategies to apply on a disillusioned landscape can be streamed on Bonniers Konsthall's website.

For more information, please contact:

Anna Harding

Email: anna.harding@hhs.se

Phone (+46) 0730 89 69 57