This work deals with the grief and stifling trauma that I and many Swedes felt in the wake of the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. But I was young and soon started my life, becoming an artist and raising a family. It is only in later years that I realised how it profoundly, yet imperceptibly, changed the conditions of the life and society I knew. In many ways, it was the final nail in the coffin of the Swedish welfare state, known as “folkhemmet.” The security I felt growing up disintegrated into the harsh neoliberal reality we now experience.

The shape in the image can resemble a dark tunnel or a cave. The murderer disappeared into Tunnelgatan with the opening to the underground passage through Brunkebergsåsen. This work is inspired by a trilogy by author John Ajvide Lindqvist, featuring a mythical twist on the assassination, with an ancient evil residing in the depths of the ridge.

The shape also reminds me of an artificial cave where I grew up. It was dark, and you couldn’t see where it ended from the entrance. After a few years of curiosity and speculation, my friends and I finally found the courage to explore it. It wasn’t very deep. Today, the entrance is sealed off.

There is a theme of lost innocence in this work. But at the same time, I think the Swedish Workers Party, which dominated most of the twentieth century, perhaps wasn’t that innocent. One might say they struck a deal with the devil by compromising and coexisting with capitalism. It could never last.

See a presentation video here.

Spread is a compilation of work made by spreading the filler along the depth of the rim with a scrape. Letting a single action shape the work is reminiscent of Richard Serra's Verb List. It functioned as a conceptual manifesto for Serra's way of producing sculptures. To spread is on the list. It´s about making art by exposing a matter to different kinds of forces.

The series features works with an appendix placed on top of the work or close to it. This object is exterior to the image plane, the illusionary "window" in the picture, but is still an intrinsic part of the whole. It connects or makes visible the two dimensions of an artwork - its inner logic and its relation to its surrounding.
The title references the famous Coca-Cola campaign and Immanuel Kant's notion of the thing in itself. It means that subjects can only experience the phenomena as they present themselves through perception. It is always fundamentally different from what the things are outside language boundaries - in themselves.