In Dead Stars (2009), Linnéa Sjöberg begins to formulate what would later become a pervasive theme in her artistry: navigating through identity, systems, matter and myth – not as separate worlds, but as intertwined languages. The work, which consists of two videos created through screen recordings of her digital workspace, moves between the cosmic and the psychological, between fact and fiction. The chemical element lithium serves as the common denominator.
Lithium is measured in dying stars and used as a medicine to stabilise bipolar disorder. Here, cosmic events are linked to bodily states, science to emotional life, digital aesthetics to inner spaces.
This work precedes her more famous performative projects (Gtds4810, Salong Flyttkartong), but in retrospect serves as a prologue to her artistic method. Already here we see the desire to penetrate structures – not to display them, but to understand how they shape us, how we can move within them, take them on, perhaps take them apart.
Based on astronomy studies of dying stars in the universe and the star cult in rock mythology. The work consists of staged documentation (screen captures) of the Internet, where the aim is to find a cross point between the two subject fields – which become the chemical element lithium. A story arises where the lithium different meaning are activated, both as a medicine for treatment of bipolar disorder (Kurt Cobain’s use of the substance) and the annulment of an antithesis against the theory of relativity called “the cosmological lithium discrepancy”. The two projections consist of screen-capture recordings of the computer desktop where my search methods are traced through the editing of images, text and sounds. The desktop reflects the working procedure which in return shows how the subjects are linked together.
Video installation (10 min), shown at Nordin Gallery Stockholm, 2009
