Who do I make art for?

Sammanfattning

This essay explores a question my father asked me shortly before he passed away: Who do you make art for? While the question appears simple, I have found that it does not lead to a single answer. Instead, it shifts alongside the work itself. Sometimes I make art for myself, sometimes for people who share similar experiences, and sometimes as a way of understanding my father, my family, and the histories that have shaped me. Raised in Fisksätra, a multicultural suburb of Stockholm, as the child of Eritrean refugees, I grew up navigating different cultural and social realities. This experience informs both the ideas and the methods behind my practice. The essay reflects on the tension of finding a place within an elite art institution while remaining connected to the communities, memories, and values that shaped my understanding of the world. Influenced by David Hammons’ spirit of resistance, I question the need for artistic legitimacy to be defined by mainstream recognition. Instead, I approach art making as a way of processing lived experience, inherited histories, and questions that cannot easily be resolved through language alone. Through four interconnected chapters, Lights, Landing, The Last Conversation, and In Square Circle, I examine the relationship between memory, materiality, intuition, and meaning. Working with everyday materials, repetition, and process based experimentation, I use art to approach experiences that resist direct explanation. In Lights, a six hour photographic documentation of a candle burning becomes a reflection on impermanence, remembrance, and the desire to hold onto memory. In In Square Circle, four aluminium ladders are dismantled and reassembled into a closed loop, leading to the unexpected discovery of a circular reflection within a square structure, a moment that connected physical order with a sense of spiritual infinity. Ultimately, this essay argues that art is not primarily about explaining or convincing. It is an internal necessity, a way of giving form to what remains difficult to express. The work becomes a moving response to my father's question, rooted in self reflection, shared history, and an ongoing search for meaning through making.