CONNY KARLSSON lundgren

Conny Karlsson Lundgren (born 1974, Sweden) is a visual artist based in Stockholm and Hoby Mosse, Sweden. With film, text, image, and performance, his work traverses the boundaries between social, political, and private identities.

In his practice, Karlsson Lundgren employs interdisciplinary methods to present alternative realities and social agreements reimagined through experiences, contrapositions, desires, and secret codes. Karlsson Lundgren is interested in the archive as both a carrier of information and a mechanism of control. He holds an MFA from the Valand Academy of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, Sweden and participated in the Studio Program at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands in 2014–15. Exhibitions include Moderna Museet Malmö, Gothenburg Museum of Art, and Extra City Kunsthal (Antwerp) among others. His work is included in the collections of the Moderna Museet and the Gothenburg Museum of Art. During 2020-2022 Karlsson Lundgren holds a residence at The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York.

At Göteborgs Konsthall Karlsson Lundgren participated in the biennial The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change 2021 and in the exhibition With New Eyes, 2021–2022.

With New Eyes

Conny Karlsson Lundgren participated in the exhibition With New Eyes – The Interwar Period Seen Through a Lens, with the work We Feel a Desire for Caresses by Men (The Gothenburg Affair) which consisted of an installation and a performance.

We Feel a Desire for Caresses by Men (The Gothenburg Affair) is based on an infamous trial in the late 1930s against a circle of homosexual men in Gothenburg. The legal proceedings investigated the network of this circle and the narratives that emerged are deeply influenced by the criminology and forensic psychology of the time.The performance included excerpts from the interrogations, delivered as a monologue in dialogue with a small collection of erotic photos found in the home of one of the men. In the monologue, the actor alternated between the accused and the prosecutor. Two objects distinguished the two perspectives: an interrogation chair for the accused and a podium for the prosecutor. Included in the work was a specially-made edit of Jazzgossen, a song by Karl Gerhard from 1922, by the duo [inaudible], based on samples and filtered sounds from the original. The Jazzgossen lyrics are an early description of a subculture of men who use feminine-coded attributes and expressions, and the revue song may have been heard often at the circle’s many dances.

The performance was performed in Swedish by Eddie Mio Larson and in English by Ido Grinberg.

The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change

Karlsson Lundgren participated in the biennial The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change 2021 with the work Our Trip to France (Mont des Tantes).

The work is based on a travel diary written in the summer of 1977 by four young homosexual men from the Gothenburg area during their stay at an international liberation camp in the south of France. These Swedish men belong to the Gothenburg-based socialist association Röda Bögar (Red Gays) and, like others who attended the camp, they were active in the struggle for the freedom and rights of homosexuals. Despite the camp’s shared goals, however, there were some big differences. These small-town Swedish gays’ tentative longing for the more worldly continental men and their insecurity around them permeate their journals. So do their femininity and their ability to use female-coded expressions as playful weapons against the patriarchy. In the film we hear a young generation of activists give expression to these journal entries, which depict several intense weeks of both joyful and anxious encounters in the heat of the south French summer. In this way, the work becomes a place for meeting across generational boundaries, where the experiences and desires of different eras, memories of the past and fantasies for the future, are woven together.