Artist in residence, Stockholm, May 6 – October 27, 2024

Martine Flor develops indexical processes that materialize moments of collapse of boundaries, thresholds and entropic forces. Drawing on her background in philosophy and critical theory, she investigates the origins and implications of negativity and its imagery, employing methods of covering and inversion to reveal underlying structures. Her mediums include experimental photographic and printmaking techniques, site specific inquiries, analog film, and handwriting. For her series Echoes From a Scene I–V, 2022, Flor draped textiles treated with photographic silver solution over pieces of furniture in darkened rooms, then exposed the light-sensitive surfaces using overhead lighting. The resulting photograms, developed and stretched, reveal double-sided imprints embedded within the fabric. Visualizing a collapse between the space, architecture, surface and material process, they become translucent boundaries. For Shell I–V, 2022, Flor used frottage to form paper into the negative spaces of plaster casts of small everyday objects. Repeated rubbing caused the plaster mold to break down, and like the entropy of memory, the original form was destroyed in the act of repetition.

Photo: Manuel Carreon Lopez

Echoes From a Scene, 2022

During her IASPIS residency, Flor will pursue a new project that explores themes of automatism and ritual to reveal a structure of lack and desire. The grid, representative of both the rationality of modernism and transcendent, universal spirituality, will function as the organizing principle. In this project, Flor plans to apply her transformative processes to imagery from non-human apparatuses such as satellites and screens, and other archeiropoetic images to highlight the thin boundary between loss of self as liberation and submission. She will be working experimentally with screen printing, frottage, and photography.

Martine Flor was born in Trondheim, Norway, and now lives in New York. She obtained an MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2018, as well as participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in 2022. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Sweden and internationally, most recently at Obra, Malmö (2023); M 23, New York (2022); Artists Space, New York (2022); Neue Kunstverein Wien, Vienna (2022); Heerz Tooya, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria (2021); and Trondheim Center for Contemporary Art (2021), among others. In 2019, she received a grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee for assisting artist Mary Kelly in her Los Angeles studio.