4. Malin Arnell is an interdisciplinary artist whose work could be described as close to the performance art or rather reflecting on the concept of performativity, which also has to do with sculpture, poetry, public art, politics and the social realm.
9. She attempts through her artistic praxis to bring light to boundaries and frameworks operative in diverse social and human interactions. She emphasizes those strongly bound to the body (her body, their body, our body), the presence, participation, membership, and other communication manifestations. The use of strictly organized structuring as well as the focus on specific communities and group dynamics are methods often employed by her in order to provide evidence for the functioning of communicative processes. This was put into practice in the project “Nobody Puts a Baby in a Corner”, a series of feminist gatherings she and Johanna Gustavsson organized in New York in 2009 and 2010. At the time both Johanna and Malin were participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.
5. She is an explorer of experience in its many and varied possibilities, who has thoroughly experimented with her own body and perception in her performances. At the same time she has carried out intense theoretical research throughout her career that should be regarded as fundamental for her practice.
6. Malin Arnell is political through being personal, because if the social begins where the skin ends, the body and the traces of experience are powerful instruments when discussing and creating political art. For a finger is needed to point out the failure in system, and there has to be a hand to attempt a change. With the intention of investigating the limits of public art and the artist’s interaction possibilities, she worked between 2003 and 2006 in the “Project Presence”, a public commissioned project realized together with patients and employees of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinic in Stockholm.
7. She is convinced of the necessity of an individual positioning, a standpoint open to revision and subjected to renegotiation, nevertheless, stable and attached to strong principles; she stands up for the need to take a side, and to perform an active role; to get dirty and to spread the dirt; to create an option and perhaps to fail instead of getting stuck on endless contemplative complaining. She is not just creating a collective and individual art praxis following the aforementioned premises, but she also has been part of the organizational crew of Konstakuten (the Art Emergency Room), an artist-run non commercial space active between 2001 and 2006, and curated “Put the light out, erase a line” in 2007 and “MAKE OUT!” in 2008.
8. She is an independent artist who confronts creation on her own, but who believes in being part of a community and in the obtained results through a collective process, seeing no contradiction in the combination of those methods. Influenced by her interest in feminist art and queer feminist activism she was part of the feminist artist and performance group “High Heel Sisters” between 2002-2007, and she is one of the founders as well as an active member of the “YES! Association”, a separatist organization for art workers whose practices and activities are informed by feminism with an intersectional perspective, at present.
10. Malin Arnell is an everlasting student, who believes that it can never be enough (questioning), that an achieved intellectual threshold is nothing but the opening gate to a new one.
11. She is a choreography PhD student at the Universtity of Dance and Circus in Stockholm, where she is currently carrying out an artistic research project: “My Body Remains the Enduring Reality. Participation Out of Bounds”, what she herself describes as “Departing from a feminist epistemological framework I will attempt to explore key issues for participating in the choreographic spaces and situations by exploring notions of intimacy, sexuality and power in order to draw conclusions about the possible relationships between consensus-making and the articulation of conflicts in view to create possible sites for participation, collectivity and community”.
1. Malin Arnell is a dyke, an artist, Swedish, a basketball player, a serious person, a life explorer, a sister, a feminist, a fighter, a citizen, an individual, a political body, a survivor, a member, a student, a lady and a rascal.
3. She is alive, has died and has been reborn several times throughout the years; last time on the 31st of April 2011 at Högkvarteret in Stockholm, as she does every time she exposes herself to the audience; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say when she consciously positions herself in a space and a time; or lets it go; or makes you sweat.
2. She always succeeds in making you feel, your transition through the space. The realization that one has experienced something. Something to bring back home that is hard to forget.
12. Malin Arnell lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm. Here and now.
/By Clara López, April 2011