Pink Has Everything

Arvida Byström has been making a certain kind of productive chaos on the internet for years. The Swedish artist built her following by doing what most people are afraid to: posting photos of her unshaved legs and armpits, documenting her period, photographing herself naked in ways that weren’t calibrated to be flattering, and treating her body as subject matter rather than commodity. It read as radical for about fifteen minutes before people realized it was just art—which is what she was doing all along.

What’s kept her interesting beyond the provocation is the range. Technology turns up constantly in her work—laptops, phones, selfie sticks—folded into something that feels dreamlike and vaguely nostalgic rather than contemporary. She once ran a multi-day live cam show broadcast from London to wherever anyone happened to be watching, which is either performance art or exhibitionism or both, and either way I respect the commitment. She makes the screen feel like a skin and the skin feel like a screen, and somewhere in that swap she finds images that stick around longer than they should.

The collaboration she did with Urbanears on a headphone collection sounds like the kind of corporate crossover that should produce something forgettable. Instead Byström described what she was going for in terms that actually mean something: I wanted it all to feel surreal and not of this world. Pink is a color that amplifies feelings. Strangely it’s seen as a weak color. Pink has its soft sides, but it can also snap back. Maybe pink has everything! That’s not copy. That’s someone who thinks about color the way I think about color, and I’m already halfway sold on whatever she made.