Draksådd [Dragon Seed] is an exhibition at Emballator by Sara Ekholm Eriksson (MFA ’22).
Emballator Lagan, a packaging industry in Ljungby, has welcomed artist Sara Ekholm Eriksson over the past year. Working closely with the company and its employees, the artist has developed an art project that is now on display at the factory and in its neighbourhood.
The project begins with the shared interests of art and industry in materials and technology, but also in the differences between production process and purpose. What happens when the artist’s work, which expresses a specific form and often requires time and many detours, meets the serial logic and efficiency of the factory? How do they learn from each other and how does it affect the work?
In Ljungby, we encounter a site-specific exhibition that testifies to processes where the factory’s materials have become important in new ways. An exhibition where the location of the factory and the history of the place emerge as the artworks connect with the storytelling tradition of Ljungby. The visitor is taken on a walk between the factory, an ancient burial ground a few stone’s throw away and the factory’s old abandoned offices. As they wander, new stories emerge at the intersection of the future and the past.
At the exhibition, the filmmaker and artist Marcus Harrling will show a film documenting Sara’s work.
In recent years, Sara Ekholm Eriksson has attracted attention for her poetic and narrative material investigations that explore the tension, possibilities and dead ends in the relationship between nature and culture, matter and life. She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art’s MFA programme in 2022 and has since been awarded the prestigious Maria Bonnier-Dahlin scholarship and exhibited at Uppsala Art Museum and Bonnier Konsthall, among others.
The exhibition is part of a collaboration of Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm School of Economics and with support from The Hamrin Foundation.