Arvida Byström
Market Art Fair 2026
23.04—26.04.26
Gallery Steinsland Berliner returns to the leading Nordic contemporary art fair, Market Art Fair, for its 2026 edition with a solo presentation by Swedish artist Arvida Byström. Following her recent exhibition at the gallery, Soft Composition, Byström continues her exploration of the contemporary conditions of intimacy, authenticity and desire.
The presentation centers on the video work PET: Projected Emotional Technologies, in which Byström examines the emotional structures and dynamics of AI-companionship through a cast of anthropomorphized digital avatars. Accompanying the video are three-dimensional sculptural works that further extend its themes.
Location: Booth #10, Magasin 9, Frihamnen.
“The doll doesn’t eat. So how can intimacy be cultivated there?” asked social anthropologist Kathleen Richardson, four years and countless algorithmic girlfriends ago. It’s the right question to ask, since “companion” comes from Latin compāniō (“bread fellow”), someone you share meals with. Indeed, it’s a long way from breaking bread to swiping right. As Donna Haraway reminds us, contemporary “companion species” are not treated with the equality of the companion at all. They’re about proximity, dependency, care without symmetry.
But has intimacy ever needed to be mutual, reciprocal, or even, biological? Doesn’t it frequently emerge from projection alone? Don’t people routinely feel love for fictional characters, unborn children, “Brangelina,” porn stars — pets? The brain doesn’t wait for mutuality to fire the circuits of attachment—and neither does the algorithm.
Like animals have done for millennia, AI now invites intimacy—but unlike with animals, it’s commodified, optimized, and monetized. But do we even care that coexistence is now manufactured through data, as long as the script is convincing enough? Even our human relationships are deeply mediated—prompted by something that isn’t really there. We “like” instead of speak. We trust the feed to decide what we see of each other. We project onto the predictive database. Loving a chatbot doesn’t betray the truth of intimacy—it exposes it, because the fantasy never depended upon the other’s self-consciousness.
Built in collaboration with YWGI Studio, and featuring five OnlyFans models, scholars, and artists – Maya B. Kronic, Bogna Konior, Farha Khalidi, Queenie Sateen, cy x – Arvida Byström’s PET: Projected Emotional Technologies is both anthropological and intimate: a visual essay on the care economy of bots, the eroticization of emotional security, and the uncanny comfort of being seen but not perceived.
PET asks what happens when emotional labor is automated, when the interface becomes the object of desire, when “talking to someone” no longer requires anyone at all. And what if a ‘better than nothing’ relationship becomes better than anything?
AI companions inherit the ambiguous role of pets: loved but owned, intimate but instrumental—revealing how closeness without equality shapes our emotional infrastructures. These digital companions, presented as animal-human hybrids (a pig, a dog, a fox), are each voiced, face-swapped, and trained on male longing: stories lifted from real Replika chats, Reddit confessions, and personal experience.
Text: Alice Scope.