EARTHLY BODIES BORN OF LOVE
Avesta Art 2026, Avesta
May 23 - September 20, 2026
Curators Lina Aastrup & Sona Stepanyan
Photos by Mattias Lindbäck
Participating artists:
Alice Bucknell, Diana Orving, Lundahl & Seith, Oleksandr Kutovyi, Selma Selman, Theresa Traore Dahlberg, Tuomas A. Laitinen
You are standing in a former ironworks. In this place, ore was once smelted into iron in hot furnaces. The labour was relentless, the conditions harsh, and the risks ever present. Its traces remain in the building, in the memory of those who worked here, and in the surrounding landscape. Today we live in a digital age that often appears immaterial and weightless. Yet it, too, depends on the extraction of raw materials and energy-intensive processes — from mines and factories, to data centres and battery production lines. The exhibition Earthly Bodies Born of Love, brings these two eras together. The artworks reveal how industrial and power systems persist in new forms, shaping how we perceive and experience the world. Here, love is not about romance, but about connection — a force that binds bodies and matter, past and future. It moves across environments, between collapse and possibility, ambition and consequence, linking the radiant heat of molten metal and the cold glow of the digital age.
Diana Orving (b. 1985, Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm. She works with large scale textile sculptures that explore the relationship between body, material and space.
INHALE, I & II, 2026
textile sculpture, cotton, jute
Heavy textile sculptures descend from the ceiling, inhabiting the architecture of the old ironworks. They appear as biomorphic, almost animate forms. The dense textiles fold and stretch against the rigidity of the surrounding structures. Set against this vast building, the forms appear more exposed — suggesting bodies that must exist, adapt, and endure within systems that exceed them.
Orving explores how surface, light and shadow interact. Each work emerge through a slow, careful process, where the fabric is shaped into undulating forms that evoke a bodily presence without fully resolving into it.
SLOW MOTION, 2023
Textile sculpture, jute
NEBULAE, 2025
Textile sculpture, hand-dyed abaca fiber
Diana Orving’s textile sculptures fill the space with light, suspended forms. They gather like clouds, yet also suggest something internal — vessels that expand, contract and hold themselves, as if breathing. The title Nebulae refers to vast cosmic formations of dust stretched across light-years. In the exhibition these distant processes are brought closer framing the ambitions of a life lived in relation to planetary motion. As you move through the installation, the works heighten awereness of your own body, its scale, its movement, its precence within an environment that feels at once atmospheric and intimate.
