Arvida Byström
Soft Composition
06.02—07.03.26
It is with great pleasure that Gallery Steinsland Berliner presents the latest solo exhibition by Swedish multidisciplinary artist Arvida Byström, titled Soft Composition. This marks her third solo presentation at the gallery and the latest in a series of acclaimed local and international exhibitions exploring the evolving relationship between technology, intimacy and authenticity.
Arvida Byström’s latest body of work comprises pieces in which craft-based processes and AI-generated imagery converge. As in several of her recent projects, the aesthetic of pornography, with its connotations of both oppression and release, serves as a site of exploration in Soft Composition. These considerations manifest in works that draw explicitly on imagery of the flesh, while oscillating between abstraction, fragmentation and form.
In Soft Composition, Arvida Byström explores the parallel “object status” ascribed to women and technology. With theoretical grounding in the work of contemporary feminist thinkers within the realm of technology, such as Sadie Plant and Bogna Konior, she illuminates how the feminine and the technological have historically been regarded as resources to be extracted, refined, and controlled. The exhibition poses the question: is femininity itself a technology?
In her work, Arvida Byström suggests that it is, by making visible the industrial hardware necessary to maintain an expected illusion of softness, such as surgically procuring the austere skeletons of sex dolls, or in the pleasing abstractions of the exhibition’s AI-generated pornographic images, wherein an extractive process becomes apparent. Here, flesh becomes data and desire becomes code. If femininity is in fact a technology, it may be our most successful simulacrum: a set of codes and forms extracted and refined to the point where skin no longer requires a human body to communicate desire.
Arvida Byström (b. 1991, SE) rose to prominence through photography and related projects that, with thoughtful acuity, explored online experience through a hyper-feminized aesthetic and an intimate perspective, alongside the contemporary rise of self-representation on the internet. She has worked both behind and in front of the camera, collaborating with global brands and publications. Her practice has since expanded into more digitally experimental photography and film, as well as performance and sculpture. The internet and emerging technologies, and their impact on our concepts of self, remain central reference points in Byström’s consistently current practice.