Marika Markström is an audiovisual artist born 1987 in Finland, currently working in Stockholm. She has a Master in Fine Arts from Malmö Art Academy 2014 and a Bachelor from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki 2012.
Her artistic expression consists primarily of paintings, sculptures and spatial sound. Accents of video, light, poem and performance may coexist in between. The works are separate but compose entities together. Her visual language turns mainly towards minimalism with traces, signs and fragments carrying ambiguous layers of meaning. Materiality, layers, geometry and colours are also central in her works.
Conceptually she often moves in ‘the borderlands of civilization’, where urban excrements of the current era – (un)consciously produced against a backdrop of rural areas deprived of their actual value – are left like everlasting, post-apocalyptic fossils. In such psychogeographical contexts the interdependence of mental, social and environmental ecologies becomes very clear. Since Marika’s MFA years concerns around the anthropocene has paired with a longtime interest in the human psyche and its changes all way back from prehistoric times until the neoliberal now. More recently she’s focusing on how a highly sensitive minority have become canaries in the coal mine when the side effects of our current paradigm enters their deviating nervous system, genetics and microbiome on molecular levels.
Other existential and spiritual issues are also tangible in Marika’s art. Like dualisms between eternal – ephemeral, material – immaterial, conscious – unconscious, evil – good, individual – collective, personal – political and artificial – natural.
