Bio
Paula Tove Maria Alderin is a visual artist whose work navigates the boundaries of language, matter, and embodied experience. Her practice unfolds through material and immaterial explorations, encompassing installation, sculpture, painting, notes, light, and text. Her work often involves performative actions—acts that move from what is seen, to what is happening, to what is dissolving, both brutally and quietly. Through various gestures and iterations—blowing, molding, liquefying, surrendering—she poses questions about the nature of reality, exploring liminal spaces and other realms, in an interplay between the intelligible and the obscure, the wild and the desolate, the remnants and the lamented.
“What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” (Harald Rosenberg, ARTnews, 1952).
Her actions take form in formation, through personally or historically charged materials—as physical substances or as containers of ideas and notions—open in intention, becoming itself a thing and not a representation of a thing. Similarly, her way of working denies the gaze control over reality. Her work explores how body and materiality, as a site of experience and confrontation, can enable the intangible to become palpable. Drawing from her own experiences of altered states of consciousness and realities beyond the apparent, her practice probes thresholds of space and concept. Through the lens of belief systems, consciousness, and philosophy, she delves into the ambiguity between the existing and the insistent, proximity and distance, flux and stillness.
“What remains after an act has ended? What are the obligations of a witness to an act that is over? These questions are thoroughly theatrical and performative, but they are also intimate and ethical”
(Peggy Phelan, Lessons in Blindness, PMLA, 2004).
She uses her canvas as an arena on which to act—before subjecting herself to the act of waiting, to begin seeing what appears in the quiet of the space. It may seem abstract, but each gesture draws a scenario, a place of being and becoming—a space of taking risks, forging new imaginaries.
Paula Tove Maria Alderin (b. 1971) lives and works inStockholm, Sweden. She holds a Postmaster in Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2023), and a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal DanishAcademy, Copenhagen (2000).
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“[…]. I call upon the wild, the untamed, the savage, the free. The raging, agitated, tempestuous. That which has not been touched by culture, desolate, deserted places.The unrestrained, uncontrolled, unbridled. That what has not been tamed, not cultivated.Wild games. Wild grief. I call upon the wild – and await the echo to reveal its location.” - Bordering the Wild, Alderin, 2023
“[…].During the exhibition Studio Giardini is transformed into Khôra, the Greek word with many definitions. Space is one but when named Khôra, it is more than a gallery with its four walls and store floors. It is a place for being and becoming, a place to take risks.[…].The French philosopher Jacques Derrida used khôra to name a radical otherness that gives place to being. Something that appears when an artwork push meaning to its limits, as a place of deconstruction. For Julia Kristeva it is a psychoanalytical term hinting at the realms of the drives, pre-symbolic yet framed by the human psyche. In Greek antiquity Khôra was the vast and untamed area beyond the city walls, unregulated and lawless: wild, dangerous but also open-ended.
At Studio Giardini Alderin and Gudrunsdotter invite visitors into their Khôra. Using time, clay, seed, dust, and metal, they challenged pre-defined imaginations. […]. When Paula Tove Maria Alderin and Katarina Elvira Gudrunsdotter intersect their art works through the concept of Khôra they explore words, space, and materiality. For Gudrunsdotter the concept holds a promise of freedom, a place released from oppression or any outside agendas. For Alderin it is a liberating act, inferno like in its force, releasing the restraints of the human world."
- Katarina Wadstein MacLeod, Delight in Peril, Studio Giardini, Venice, 2024.