Clara J:son Borg is a Swedish artist based in Rotterdam (NL). Her artistic practice exists within a performative framework in which she researches onto-epistemic openings surrounding the human body, its performance strategies and political subjects. She also investigates knowledge hierarchies and how this plays out between human and non-human entities. Through storytelling she lets her works exist within a boundary area where human vulnerability intersects with political, social and natural forces.
Aeon - Aeon is situated around an old limestone quarry in Malmö, Sweden, and is investigating ideas around Western knowledge production, not-knowing as a radical position of learning and social constructions that floats between practices of remembering and forgetting. The narrative is carrying conversations around human extraction of natural resources which are framed by stories from the artist´s ancestors working in the quarry and their dreams of a better life as working class.
The theatrical element of the film brings the narrative forward and backward in time simultaneously and is looking for moments when time loops, moments where ritual and theatre merge, and allows for attempts of healing.
A liaison to a life no longer ordered from above (2021) - 4k video / 28 min / sound A liaison to a life no longer ordered from above,is a film resulting from a collaborative research project with the dancers and artists Aris Papadopoulos, Christina Karagianni,
Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Aspasia Giannoulaki, Markella Ksilogiannopoulou,
Christos Fousekis. The group worked around urbanism in the neighborhood of Nea Ionia in Athens with a core idea to treat personal memories and experience are knowledge. The research group launched the exploration of this knowledge in conversation with theory and non-representational movement mapping. With this method, a new space between fiction and fact occurred, a place of remembering, reimagining and becoming was created for the group in process of (dis)orientation.
IMAGO (2020) - 4k video / 18 min / sound Photo: Sol Archer Sound: Tom Polkam / Nick Thomas Assisting director: Marta Hryniuk Actors: Maarten Heijnens / Annefleur Schep Through a fragmented performative framework, Imago is a work that explores historical European philosophical thinking around movement and mobility. It's script is based on ideas such as Hobbes's thinking around voluntary and involuntary movements, about the 16th century's longing and escapism to exotic places and platonic ideas around how humans desires gets formed.
Like a not-knowing (2021) - Text installation / Sound 10.13 min Like a not-knowing is a text work and a sonic environment that is dwelling on different perspectives of time. The works' fragmented narration raises questions about how we relate to the past, which relationships we set up towards the future, how remembering takes place between the body and the intellect, and what we think that we might have forgotten. https://soundcloud.com/ungleonsey/press-play-to-listen
I had never seen a sky so blue (2020) - 4k video / 18 min / sound. I have never seen a sky so blue is a work that departs from the memories of the artist’s mum’s volunteer trip from Sweden to a kibbutz in Israel in 1972. The work oscillating between the artist’s mum’s narration about her life as a 17’n young woman in Sweden, her ideas and desires of exploring the socialist utopia at the kibbutz, her experience from the trip and time as a volunteer. Along this a conversation between the artist and her mum is conducted about the Swedish and global political, social and religious environments that enabled volunteer trips to kibbutz. The stories and the conversations establish a tension between the mum’s empirical
knowledge and memories and the historical and studied knowledge of the artist. The tension builds up and breaks down the conversation in which the gap between the generations and their idea of history and the
political and philosophical climate and identity becomes visible.
THE CHASE TO BE AMONG MEN (2018) - Performance / 30 min / Performed by Raluca Croitoru, Michelle Mantsio and Clara J:son Borg.
In the Chase To Be Among Men parallel notions parallel notion of evolution and human changes of the body’s physical capacity, and an overview of Swedish defence identities gets presented. Through storytelling and non-representational movements bodily notions and identities are mapped out to establishes a conversation around what have fostered human defence behaviours and subjectivities
The mapping is an intermix between human usage of the arm, dance training and drug use with geo-politics demarcations and political ideologies.
The work attempts to establish an intersectional view of defence from an embodied subjective perspective and to converse about how nature and political performance strategies become shaping factors in how we build up our ontologies of ourselves and our social choreography.
A PRACTICE OF A FLEXIBLE HORIZON (2018) - Installation / 3 architectural prints, 150x200mm / single channel video, 10.44 min / multi-channel video, loop
A practice of a flexible horizon addresses different ideas and concepts around western choreographic, linguistic and social kinetic structures in relation to the division of land, the history of mobility and philosophical approaches to space.
A PRACTICE OF A FLEXIBLE HORIZON– lecture performance (2018) - Performance / 30 min / Performed by Amy Pickles, Daniel Tuomey och Clara J:son Borg
The lecture performance is trying to follow a investigative structure of Actor Network Theory and is putting forward ideas around western and colonial division of land, of juridical structures of that forms or
choreography, about how moving can be a physical identity of pleasure.
3,1,1,1 – lecture performance (2018) - Performance / 40 min / Performed by Michelle Mantsio and Clara J:son Borg.
3,1,1,1 is a collaborative project between the artist Michelle Mantsio (AUS) and Clara J:son Borg.
The point of departure in for the 3,1,1,1 project was an investigation of the human pronounces performance strategies and ability of transformation in relation to architecture, sound, geography and smell.
SCORES TOWARDS A BAROQUE CARE (2016) - HD Colour video / loop (6.06 min) / Sound
The work’s projected imagery is collected from a tapestry hanging at Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede (NL). In the dark the camera is encountering the projections. Through its movements it is creating an extended choreography which together with a voice over established the works narrative. The voice over is telling stories, asking questions and occasionally screams towards the images. An interaction which initiates conversations surrounding relationships between nature/culture, space/time and the body as a caring or disappearing object.
