Leif Holmstrand (1972-), artist and writer. A Malmö resident since 1997. Heavy sculptural installation pieces built out of garbage, textiles and manipulated cut-up furniture may alternate with sound installation, still image, crochetings, knittings, text and video. Performance art also plays an important part in this body of work. Collaborations with Japanese artists, such as the collective OLTA, have been important throughout the years. Recent works in the field of visual art deal with the subcultural phenomena bugchasing, waste as readable cultural artefacts, queerness, sickness, defence of perversion, and death.
Title : OGOGUGU
Diary entry of 2020-04-08. Singing and half-dancing. The outfit is almost finished. I’ll tell you all about it later.
Title : AWAKENING FILM (WILL NEVER HAPPEN)
A short video based on art happening documentation, shot 2019 at the Panora Cinema in Malmö, Sweden, during the “Fish Tank” exhibition. The idea was to produce music and moving images during a three days long shoot performance art piece, to become a lengthy music film, or more likely many short ones. For a while the end result was to be a square silent movie.
Title : Nonsense Translation
date: September 23, 2018
venue: Zarya Center for Contemporary Art in Vladivostok, Russia
Documentation by Ksenija Shmel and Vadim Martynenko.
Leif Holmstrand’s three hours long happening, action or performance
Title : FAKE BONES
date: 17 – 26th September 2015
venue: LILITH PERFORMANCE STUDIO, Malmö, Sweden
FAKE BONES was a ten day long performance piece were collaborated with the Japanese artist collective OLTA – Inoue Toru, Umeda Gosuke, Kawamura Kazuhide, Hasegawa Yoshiro, Saito Takafumi, Meguninja and Jang-Chi.
In FAKE BONES, magic rituals around eating, physicality, birth and death were faked. Ritual cooking, cooking shows, oracle activities and dissolution of both time and personality were faked in an ongoing process. Plastic bones, rawhide bones for dogs and boned strollers are present.
For several weeks, they created on-site an universe with common interests related to biology, shamanism, radioactive mutations, fantasies of the body, eating, dissolve the ego boundaries, bio-politics and an open eye for beauty and reproduction of weirdness, where Leif’s imagery was melted together with OLTA’s.
The visitors were invited to their organism in which Leif carefully disassembled several prams and cooked them, fried, boiled and baked them with more possible food. The pram food was served to the audience and to OLTA, that built and improvised along with Holmstrand in a long fragmented collage like cycle where sound, voice and poetry became a central element.
In Holmstrand’s art, he combines traditional textile art with a fascination for horror movies and burlesque popular culture. In crochet and knitting, he creates objects, covers and clothing impossible to wear. He coats and wraps objects and bodies in rope, yarn and cord. His works are characterized by an abnormal and paranoid corporality with a dark relation to sexuality and the surrounding world. The themes in his works are similar irrespective of mode of expression: a dreamlike dissolution of gender, where he tries to find and stretch the cultural and biological boundaries of the body.
In OLTA’s work the man’s relationship to nature, the primary conditions of existence and the Japanese culture and pop culture are recurring starting points. OLTA consists of seven artists born in the 80s, which all lives and works in Tokyo. The Art Collective was formed in 2009 and since then the group have made a series of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions in Japan.