Fia Backström

When Fia Backström (b. 1970) started showing her work in New York in the early aughts, she self-organized under the moniker Fia Backström Productions and invited people to her loft. Her first official exhibition there, 1,000,000 People Including Satellite Suburbs, was aptly titled. How and why people come together—the terms of collective engagement—would be one of the perennial concerns of Backström’s practice over the next decade. Yet it was the title of an earlier trial run, called I’m Afraid of Everything, that offers clues as to where she’s heading now. Backström understands collectivity as not only a question of neighborhoods but of nervous systems, and the social as inseparable from sensorial force.

The entanglement of matter and meaning—in concrete poetry, in presidential rhetoric, in the modulations of the human voice—will be points of departure for a series of installations and events with Fia Backström at The Artist’s Institute over the next six months.

There are over a thousand English language books titled or subtitled “the Art of Public Speaking.” The phrase is a cliché of rhetoric itself, of course, meant to dignify the deceit of public persuasion. But read another way, it is a wry invocation for Fia Backström’s staged environment and set of workshops, Studies in Leadership— the golden voice (2009), which twines oratory’s manipulation of semiotics and emotion with the aesthetic operations of poetry, bodywork, and graphic design. Documents from Eileen Myles’ run for President in 1992 are in the room too, as a kindred attempt to figure the relationship between art and public rhetoric. Their complex tone—both mordant and hopeful—like Backström’s, is neither neatly critical nor complicit. Outside on the front gate, Backström is creating a platform for an evolving public poem. First up, performance artist Malin Arnell.