The duo Byström Källblad makes performance, film, and installation work for public space, stages, and galleries. Visual artist Helena Byström and choreographer Anna Källblad share a desire to tell stories based on collaborations and specific places. Fearlessly with both seriousness and humor they develop concepts inspired by challenges in society today and seek to express its complexities through choreography and visual art. They have shown work in places like city landscapes, a sports arena, a nuclear power plant, a library, Dansens Hus Stockholm, Shibuya Crossing Tokyo, Sakakini Art Centre Ramallah, Stockholm City Hall, Uppsala Cathedral, Kulturhuset, The Royal Dramatic Theatre and the Modern Museum in Stockholm.
A celebration dance for inaugurations, manifestations, and turning points. A performance of dance and song for squares, plazas, and open fields. Byström Källblad takes a feminist approach to traditional dancing and explore female rituals, developing the theme of a female public body in open spaces in relation to power, cultural expression, history, and present time. Also raising their voices performing calling, a vocal technique dating from the Middle Ages, practiced by women in the mountains between Sweden and Norway and in western Finland.
City Horses film installation premiered 2023 at Liljevalchs+
What happens when a woman in a public space starts acting without conforming to norms or caring about approval? How does it feel to do that? Having toured from the very north of Sweden, through Europe and to Australia, with over a hundred female dancers performing City Horses, Byström Källblad here lets the audience inside the performance. In a four channel film installation, you get to come close to bodies, voices and experiences of women moving freely in cities around the world. Stockholm Art Gallery Liljevalchs+ March-April 2023.
City Horses
In our cities, on bronze horses, proud kings quietly stare above our heads. Their history and visual male dominance daily manifested and passed on to the next generation. Where are the women and their stories? This was the starting point for City Horses – a city choreography with twenty female dancers about power, existence, and the female body in the public space, a gallop through cities, a living monument in constant motion, celebrating female courage and power of all ages. Since the premiere in 2017 in Stockholm with Dansens Hus, City Horses has toured Europe and to Australia, and Mexico.
Blånagla Art Fest and jubilee/new work Unna för unna 2024
Site-specific dance performance, music, and art installations in the old community dance barn in Orrviken, Husum in August since 2014. Blånagla Art Fest explores the transition from the Industrial Age and manual labor into the work-life of today and imagined future, in a bruksort, a town built in the early 1900s around a factory. When local owners are replaced by an international corporation, robots for men and women, how are local identity and life affected or transformed, for people living now and memories of the past? With climate change, it’s affects on living conditions, and international corporations deforesting, speculating, and mining the area for raw materials with reduced carbon footprint as a marketing strategy. From memories of the past, through the footprints we leave today, what will future memories be? New dance solo, Unna för unna for dancer Conny Jansson, premiered on August 3, 2024.
Astrid
Film installation with young women from Norberg and with traces of memories from female history from the area. In the very room, Fanny Brate painted her daughters hundred years ago in the painting Namnsdag, today exhibited at the National Museum in Stockholm, two young women, as Fanny’s daughters did, prepare for a celebration. Anticipation and waiting blend with small talk of wishes and ideas about a party. The framework of the space, its reference to the painting by Fanny Brate, the storytelling of historical women from Norberg, the naming of names, all blend in a poetic reflection of female visibility, through history and now. Premiered July 2022 Brategården, Bråfors bergsmansby. Commission by Region Västmanland.
AVAILABLE WORKS 2023-2025
Dance performances: Calling we are here, City Horses,
Film: City Horses film installation
Calendar
Calling we are here, Hallen i Farsta September 21
Residence for new work, Space and Place Falun, Riksteatern, Dalateatern September-December 2024
Byström Källblad are supported by the Swedish Arts Council, Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Region Västmanland, Region Stockholm, and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.