Marie Karlberg

Art Brokerage: Marie Karlberg Swedish Artist: b. 1985. I started making art, especially performances and videos, as a reaction against prescribed forms of social existence. This reaction came most importantly from being identified as woman, as a sexualized other, which formed the basis of my performance, "A Woman for Sale," a work in which I transform myself into product through cultural assumptions of femininity. Recently, I've been exploring other artistic strategies, namely installation, in order to provoke more atmospheric forms of confrontation, a coping tactic to deal with the cultural wound that performance is nowadays. This began with my project "Infested", a collaborative group performance that situated a number players parasitically within a social setting. On top of the performance, I rubberized the room, so to speak. The walls and the furniture were covered with sheets of clinical and industrial rubber as a way of affectively charging the environment to the tune of a prophylactic. My interest in the signification of this material continued in a follow-up project, "Your Lips are So Soft," a more conventionally object-oriented exhibition that saw these rubbers, like my femininity in "A Woman for Sale," turned into product. Among these objects works were several that included drawings, a practice that I have been exploring consistently for past several years. While not explicitly connected to topics addressed by my larger projects, they nevertheless reflect a continuous process of imaginative thought that informs my practice in general, largely aiding me in exploring the communicative range of this practice's somewhat conventional gestures, primarily finding ways of rendering artistic marks in the interest of performative attitudes. Listings wanted.