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Lundahl & Seitl are pioneers of a new immersive anti-disciplinary practice within contemporary art and performance. In their work, simulated realities are left incomplete, with triggers and nudges that activate the visitor’s ability to create independent meaning from a web of mental and physical objects. Notions of freedom, autonomy, and what is real, imagined and perceived are negotiated by the visitors themselves, in philosophical investigations of boundaries and connections between the living, objects, places and environments. Lundahl & Seitl’s work examines where and when works of art exist, where one’s own body begins and ends in space and where it extends into a social body, and what other states of being are possible in the world.

Since 2003, Lundahl & Seitl’s artwork has produced a tacit knowledge of how works of art oscillate between being immaterial copies, reproductions, paraphrases, ekphrasis or transcriptions in the form of “new originals”, where visitors temporarily lend their consciousness and body so that the works can take place in them. Through a heuristic relationship to process, and created in collaboration between disciplines, the duo have developed an art form and method containing staging, choreographed movement, instructions, sculpture, spatial-sound, augmented & virtual reality.

Compared to the performance art tradition, where the real and authentic is linked to moments in time which cannot be repeated, the work of Lundahl & Seitl absorbs events, people, architecture and environments, and records it into a score that can be re-experienced and repeated: never exactly the same for each person that enters it.

The works are often created as part of a new commission by a museum, an art centre or biennial. By observing how specific times and events can define a period of an artist’s work, Lundahl & Seitl have devoted themselves to analyse how perception acts as an active medium. Their works of art exist in the form of psychosomatic experience, which stretches the memory’s ability to absorb data via choreography and matter over time – from the earth’s deep past as unicellular cyanobacteria to a post-anthropocene future, living things are brought together with geology. Geological time is embedded in objects and tools that are mediated through technology: the hammer, the piano, radio technology from Marconi to VR and art objects.

In an exhibition this autumn at Norrtälje Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden, copies and transcriptions in various materials and media spit out from the virtual space into the physical; for example, versions of works from Max Ernst, Allen McCollum, Ronald Jones, On Kawara, Andrei Tarkowsky, Philippe Parreno, Dani Karavan, and Elaine Sturtevant: “the first artist in history to have had a solo exhibition with all artists except herself.” A newly written short story by Malin Zimm and Jonatan Habib Engqvist follows, reflects, distorts and reinforces the exhibition’s own logic through fiction, and again asks the question where and when a work of art exists. The works’ visitors temporarily lend their consciousness and body so that the works can take place in them.

Lundahl & Seitl’s works and projects have been exhibited worldwide, including (but not limited to): in the UK at Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, Royal Academy of Arts, Cell Project Space and NOMAD Projects; in Germany at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berliner Festspiele, Hamburger Kunsthalle, MMK2 and Kunstmuseum Bonn; in France at Center Pompidou-Metz, and Avignon Festival; in Belgium at S.M.A.K, STUK and Museum M; in Switzerland at Kunsthalle Bern; in Austria at Steirischer Herbst and Museum der Moderne; in India at the Kochi Muziris Biennalen; in South Korea at Wooran Foundation; in Iceland at Cycle Festival; in Norway at Momentum 8 – Tunnel Vision, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art; in Sweden at Weld, Nationalmuseum, Dramaten, Accelerator and Magasin III; and in the USA at SOCAP California.

Lundahl & Seitl are supported by Kulturrådet, Kulturbryggan and Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists, as well as Arts Council England and the British Council.

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‘Words fail those experiences existing beyond descriptive language.
And in the face of this, Lundahl and Seitl have spun their poetry into syncopated verse, a counterpoint between the unknowable and the unsayable. They have paired Agnoseology with the Unsayable, immersing you within an experience as majestic, as it is disquieting, just there… right there, … yet, forever adrift from language. Lundahl and Seitl’s art sits near the center of one of the most crucial philosophical dilemmas of our time, and that is to wonder where the limits of language exist, and in turn, where the limits of experience and knowledge exist, or more crucially to try to imagine what we cannot know.’

Ronald Jones, from the essay: ‘A Voice Comes to One’ on the work by Lundahl & Seitl