Arvida Byström: There Will Be Blood

Swedish artist Arvida Byström makes photographs that sit somewhere between self-portrait and horror show—her face bloated, disfigured, smeared with fake blood and paint, sometimes barely recognizable. The work is transgressive in the way that matters: it’s not trying to shock you, exactly, it’s trying to show you something about the grotesque that lives inside the everyday, the way the body can become utterly estranged from itself. She’s been doing this for years, shooting herself in these various states of beautiful ruination, and the longer you look at the images the less you can tell where the artifice ends and something real begins. There’s a restraint to it despite the extremity—no caption, no explanation, just the image. It’s the kind of work that makes you uncomfortable in a way that matters, that lingers after you’ve stopped looking.