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Language is central to Backström's practice, including the ways it breaks down during experiences of psychosis.

Fia Backström Wins Borlem Prize for Mental Health

Fia Backström, Aphasia as a visual way of speakingon A-production and other language syndromes (2014). Part of the exhibition Greater New York at MoMA PS1, 2017. Photo: Charles Roussel.

Fia Backström has been awarded the U.S. $40,000 Borlem Prize, which goes to an artist who brings awareness to mental health issues.

Backström, who teaches at Cooper Union, represented Sweden at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

She spoke about her text-based practice and the 'schizo-chaotic methods' of artist Linda Sibio, whose organisation Bezerk Productions will receive half of the prize money.

(Last year's winner, Ebecho Muslimova described her practice as 'a desperate need to ascribe to the outside what is festering on the inside.')

Fia Backström, The Last of US—that safe spot in the dot above I in the word life (2022). Part of the exhibition In Support at The Kitchen.

Fia Backström, The Last of US—that safe spot in the dot above I in the word life (2022). Part of the exhibition In Support at The Kitchen. Photo: Paula Court.

Your work makes use of the promotional ephemera of the art world—the white noise of press releases, posters, and so on. What interests you about them?

The social side of ephemera interests me. It is distributed, shared, and circulated among the community who produced it as a trace or record of events that are not always officially tracked through. Tone of address is a way to connect. The institutional text is one way that the voice speaks through. It has been a productive surface to intervene in. The detritus of art, like crates, residues of exhibition hangings, and more is similarly a social space or trace or art objects.

The Borlem Prize seeks to bring awareness to mental health issues. Can you share how mental health issues impact your own practice?

I bring my own experiences into my artistic practice through my formal relation to language fragmentation and visualisation, as a testament to interior mechanics during experiences of psychosis. There are other formal ways that reverberate these experiences, for example how image space operates, but also structurally and thematically. I use various pedagogical methods when teaching that address this, most importantly the schizo-chaotic methods of artist Linda Sibio, to whose organisation Bezerk Productions I donated part of this prize.

Your most lauded works include Aphasia as a visual way of speaking—on A-production and other language syndromes (2014), The Growth and its Perennials (2014–2016), and The Last of US—that safe spot in the dot above I in the word life (2022). How do they factor into your broader practice?

The media for these works are text based performance, a medium I often return to. They address language use and representation in relation to the body.

The Growth juxtaposes intimate iPhone macro photography against larger global flows and diaristic entries about my own mental state and medication.

Aphasia as a visual way of speaking—on A-production and other language syndromes moves through various fragmentations and language operations, using an aleatory [chance-based] score to talk about emotions, quantification, global english as a connector, and the embodiment of language and speaking.

The Last of US—that safe spot in the dot above I in the word life is probably the work where I most directly address my own history with mental health struggles, where personal stories intermix the history of the institution through its debris, through various language and environmental operations.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a few things. Most related to the prize is a book titled Shape of Co- to Come, which addresses the intersection between the Swedish cooperative learning movement and free jazz musicians at the ABF house (the workers educational association) in Stockholm. —[O]

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