In the film “Starfish”, the work process in Sonja Nilsson’s studio takes center stage, where, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, she sculpts a body made of organic material such as hair, skin and flesh. The film alternates between observational footage and more subjective view of the space. As the body gradually takes shape, the sculpted (dead) thing begins to feel more and more alive. Simultaneously, as an analogy for unattainable dreams, the film echoes the melancholy of Terry Jacks’ song Seasons in the Sun: “the stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach.” Even if the attempt to create a human being is ultimately doomed, the creation itself takes on a poignant purpose — akin to a vanitas image — acting as a spur to emotion and self-reflection.
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Starfish
BY
Sonja Nilsson
About the artist
Sonja Nilsson (b. 1977) is a visual artist based in Berlin and Ljusdal, Sweden.
Nilsson’s artistic practice spans across installation, video, writing and performance. Her work explores themes of social psychology, subjective experience of reality, and the transient and ephemeral. The place or state that is in between – the liminal – has consistently been recurring in her works. She constructed a corridor of mirrors, a piece that examines the surveillance gaze in the Panopticon. The 150 square meter installation has been permanently installed in Avesta Art’s premises in Sweden since 2006. In a solo exhibition at Färgfabriken in 2013, she made a video installation made up of dioramas that told the anatomy of the course of events surrounding an evening of an erotic adventure that ended in violence. Between 2017 and 2021, she exhibited a series of works under the titel “Visibility is a Trap” that dealt with a theme around the phenomenon of Passing (sociology). The exhibition was shown on eight different occasions in Sweden, Germany and Belgium. Her work is represented in the collection of Gothenburg Museum of Art, she has received grants from the Art Academy’s prize committee and Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation.