At NKF Diana & Johan presented Sleeping and brushing, snoring and flossing. It consisted of one co-authored work which was a sound piece and two additional works by each artist. One artist was the main figure in the other’s work, cumulating as two books that can interact with each other successfully whilst also standing alone. One featured photographs of Johan brushing and the other drawings of Diana sleeping.
We both had projects that we’d been doing for a long time, based on daily rituals, meaning that there was no natural end point to them. The residency allowed us to summarise and present these bodies of work. Although the works did not start off as a collaboration, with RISK(U) we had the opportunity to imagine it as a collaboration. We were curious about how it would look and feel to have the connection between the works highlighted and exaggerated. We were also interested in witnessing and receiving the reception of such a concept: something that is billed as a collaboration but which can also work alone outside of its collaborative context. Important to this was also the opportunity to invite an audience to discuss and feedback on the concept.
RISK(U) was the perfect opportunity for Diana to invite Johan, whom she had collaborated with on a few projects in the past. With practices in different mediums and less apparent visual ascetics, Diana & Johan work conceptually parallel with each other in their respective practices. Common grounds are working with the familiar, in open ended and non time limited projects, and a strong relationship between photography & painting. The short duration of the residency supported with funding meant a short, committed and intense moment for experimentation which may have taken longer to reach without the residency.
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole works with both lens and non-lens-based photography, which takes the form of installation, performance, print and moving images. Her work takes from the conditions of everyday life. At the centre of Agunbiade-Kolawole practice lies an investigation of the process exploring new forms through established techniques. https://dianakolawole.com/
Johan Franzén is a painter living and working in Stockholm, he is a graduate of Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, Sweden. His paintings are of people and things he has a personal relationship to. He is interested in the filters and representations of reality. https://johanfranzen.se/