Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is pleased to present the public performance "The Growth and Its Perennials" by Fia Backström.

The globe, my intestines, the labor market, our friendships, your neuro-psychology, my compost, all entangled eco-systems. Just like the stock market can bloom, so can the garden and psychosis. After devastation, infrastructures re-structure, re-organize, re-grow and grow again. Muscles grow, as does the national debt. Everything is intertwined, my feelings become your outburst, my battery’s release leads to a bird’s disease.

— Fia Backström

Much of Backström’s work has dealt with the terms of collective engagement and abstraction. In The Growth and Its Perennials, she investigates the effects of barely-visible forces on the body by considering the oscillating line between self and other/self and material. By juxtaposing intimate images of her garden with stories about the gardens of cultural figures, including filmmaker Derek Jarman’s and that of Voltaire’s fictional character Candide, The Growth and Its Perennials is offered as a site from which to understand the interconnectedness of social, economic, and sensorial forces of varying scales. Backström not only asks, “Can we use our collective anxieties to connect and to create new rhythms for future rituals?,” but she models this by inviting the audience to vocalize the presence of non-perceptible realities with her. The Growth and Its Perennials demonstrates how collectively holding space for the hypersensitivities that we are often told are not real can be a powerful ground for connection. (T. Fazeli)

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Fia Backström is an artist based in New York, NY. Working in diverse mediums including photography, writing, installation, and performance, Backström agitates the social life of language and materials. Her practice maintains a longstanding inquiry into the glue of collectivity. Recent solo projects include The Shape of Co- to Come at ABF, Stockholm (2016), and ME have to be turned upside down to become WE at Zinc Bar, New York (2014). She has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (2015), MoMA (2010), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2008) in New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); and tranzit, Prague (2008). Backström was the subject of a survey at the Artist’s Institute in 2015 and represented Sweden in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Her work can be found in the collections of Moderna Museet and the Whitney Museum.