Tove Kjellmark: The Horse, the Robot & the Immeasureable

Tove Kjellmark’s solo exhibition The Horse, the Robot & the Immeasureable presents a of hybrid sculptures, videos and drawing. The exhibition has previously been shown in Färgfabriken, in Stockholm. In Kunsthalle Seinäjoki, it will be adapted to the rough, concrete-surfaced exhibition space Halli.

Kjellmark’s focus and ongoing study is the horse, a being with whom she has a deep emotional bond, as well as the self-constructed robots she works with. Horses and humans have a long shared history where the horse has assumed the role of a robot for human purposes, something that’s still relevant today when many horses must perform well to earn their right to exist. Through her art, Tove Kjellmark shows how our relationship with animals and robots reveals something significant about the anthropocentric view of the world.

The exhibition has been shown in Färgfabriken, Stockholm, in 2022, in a building that was originally built as a factory. In Seinäjoki, the exhibition will be adapted to concrete-surfaced space, Halli. The rugged milieu, which exudes industrial architecture and the history of the building, creates a rough backdrop for the delicate, detailed work.The works seek the immeasurable, question habitual thought patterns, and reflect on the dissolution of bodily boundaries such as the movement between life and death. Fragments of the horse’s spirit, traces of movement which have solidified and are shaped as physical echoes. Like the feeling of a slowly eroding memory or a life that first comes into being and then fades away, turning into something new.

Through various measurement techniques such as motion capture, 3D-scanning and thermal imaging, the artist has investigated subtle processes in different movement patterns in humans, animals, and robots in an attempt to approach the immeasurable. This is an artistic practice-based exploration of potential new values and sedimentary expressions, sprung from translations between materiality and immateriality through digital, analogue and performative techniques. The digital imprints from the encounter with the horse’s corporality have since been processed by both the artist and self-constructed robots into what has become a kind of hybrid sculpture where new digital technology and traditional materials such as bronze and marble merge.
Tove Kjellmark

Tove Kjellmark (b.1977) is based in Stockholm, Sweden. She is educated at École des beaux arts and The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where she received her M.F.A. 2009. Kjellmark is initially trained as a sculptor. Besides working in her studio she teaches, mentors and collaborates with humans and non-humans of various types and technologies. Tove Kjellmak’s work can be described as visual appropriations of forms and structures from the complex world in which we live. She is currently looking at the glitches in transformations between the digital and the organic; the gaps in the experience when moving from one world to another. Tove Kjellmark is recognized for creating spaces of critical reflection about techno-scientific acceleration, artworks that asks questions about the nature of human and nonhuman agency in a highly ‘indoctrinated’ post-human world.