Flare-Up
Accelerator presents Flare-Up, a solo exhibition by Stockholm-based artist duo Goldin+Senneby. The exhibition focuses on issues of autoimmunity, accessibility, and ecology. Most of the works are created specifically for the exhibition and are shown together with related works from recent years. Large-scale installations, paintings, drawings and sculptures are presented across three rooms.
Illustration by Johan Hjerpe in relation to Goldin+Senneby's work 'Crying Pine Tree' (2020-2024)
About the exhibition
The title of the exhibition, Flare-Up, is based on the artists’ experience of living with multiple sclerosis (MS). When Jakob Senneby had his first flare-ups, doctors told him he had an ‘overactive immune system’ and a ‘body at war with itself’. While he could never quite identify with such metaphors, they fit all the better with the immunosuppressive drugs offered by the pharmaceutical industry. These lucrative treatments can reduce the dramatic flare-ups but do little to slow the gradual deterioration over time. Flare-Up also alludes to the volatile and flammable nature of pine resin. Induced by injuries and infestations, resin acts as the tree’s immune system. It recurs as material in several works at Accelerator.
The bark beetle plays a central role in this exhibition. The processes that bark beetles trigger in trees, ecosystems and the forest industry have informed several works, especially the two new installations, Pheromone Traps (2025) and Blue-Stain Ramp (2025). Goldin+Senneby has built a ramp out of wood from spruces felled by bark beetles. The ramp leads visitors across a pond of resin and creates a new passageway between the rooms at Accelerator, making its different levels accessible. On the landing at the top of the ramp lies an excerpt from a forth-coming novel by fiction writer Katie Kitamura, which revolves around experiences of autoimmunity. The artists have collaborated with Kitamura since 2018.
Works in the exhibition
Blue-Stain Ramp, 2025
A ramp (slope 1:20) built from two spruces felled by bark beetles forms an access route in the exhibition. A tree attacked by bark beetles defends itself by trying to drown the insects in resin. The discolouring of the wood is caused by the blue stain fungi that assist the bark beetles in breaking down resin. As Nordic consumers dislike blue stain wood, bark beetle-damaged trees are almost exclusively used as pulpwood in this part of the world.
Resin Pond, 2025
This site-specific installation was created by melting and pouring one ton of resin directly onto the floor of one of Accelerator’s galleries. The role of resin in nature is to heal wounds and injuries that occur on the tree and keep unwanted fungi and pests away. As a material, resin has been used in numerous ways. Its antiseptic qualities have long been valued in folk medicine, and it can be reworked into varnish, glue, and perfume. Amber is fossilised resin.
Lego Pedometer Cheating Machines, 2019
The building instructions for these Lego robots are found on patient forums on YouTube. They are DIY devices made to cheat the phone’s pedometer and thus get around requirements from insurance companies for shared health data and activity goals.
Flare-Up by Katie Kitamura with Goldin+Senneby, 2023
Since 2018, Goldin+Senneby has collaborated with writer Katie Kitamura to explore experiences of autoimmunity and its metaphors of a ‘body at war with itself’. The artists’ research, experiments and performances have inspired Kitamura’s fiction, which in turn has influenced the duo’s artistic output. Flare-Up is the working title of the as yet unfinished novel Kitamura is writing in collaboration with the artists. The novel comprises two discrete parts set in parallel versions of the same world. One part revolves around a mysterious pine tree with a supercharged immune system, while the other tells of a stranger whose sense of self—and biological coherence—comes into question as he seeks a novel treatment for his illness. The first two chapters from each part are published for this exhibition.
Swallowimage, 2025
The immunosuppressive fungus Isaria sinclairii has been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine as a potion for eternal youth. In the 1990s, the active substance in the fungus was patented by an international pharmaceutical company and launched as the first pill for treating MS.
In this series of works, older paintings featuring themes of death and disease have been treated with the fungus, which is grown directly on the backside of the canvas. The title is borrowed from German 18th century “Schluckbildchen”: devotional portraits of saints known for miraculous healing which the faithful would swallow as remedies for their own ailments.
After Landscape, 2024 – ongoing
in collaboration with Fernando Cáceres (painting conservator)
Reconstructions of protective frames with traces from climate actions targeting famous landscape motifs. The protective frames were reconstructed by painting conservator Fernando Cáceres based on documentation provided by the conservators at the museums where the attacks took place.
Historically, landscape painting precedes the concept of landscape itself. The word ‘landscape’ was imported from Dutch landscape painting, and it took several decades before the meaning also referred to landscape views outside of art. Unlike the iconoclasms of previous centuries, recent attacks on landscape motifs have not reached the paintings themselves but have stopped at the protective glass, also known as the ‘climate frame’. The works have been installed in front of openings in the wall corresponding to the size of the absent landscape paintings.
Starfish and Citrus Thorn, 2021
For two thousand years, ‘immunity’ was exclusively a legal and political concept. In the winter of 1882, zoologist Elie Metchnikoff pushed a citrus thorn under the skin of a starfish larva and referred to the accumulation of cells around the thorn as an ‘immune defence’. This introduced an entirely new medical theory that understood the body as being at war with its surroundings.
In this series of paintings, Goldin+Senneby have used the same tissue dyes that Metchnikoff used to stain the transparent starfish and applied them to the word ‘immunitas’ as it was first used in Roman legal texts. The titles of the individual works include a translation of how the concept of immunity is used on that particular page of the Codex Theodosianus.
Pheromone Traps, 2025
In symbiosis with a blue stain fungus, the bark beetle can break down resin and convert it into pheromones—species-specific odorants that attract other bark beetles. The bark beetle is widely considered the single biggest threat to forestry in Sweden; lost profits in the forest industry amount to billions of Swedish krona every year. Planted forests with a lack of biodiversity are particularly vulnerable. To monitor the bark beetle population, the Swedish Forest Agency has set up traps with a synthetic version of the bark beetle pheromones at various locations nationwide. It provides forest owners with an online map of beetle swarming activity.
At the same time, the bark beetle is a keystone species without which entire ecosystems would collapse. Hundreds of fungi, insects and birds depend on the dead wood and the sunlit clearings that the bark beetle creates by way of its tree-felling activities.
Multiple Scars, 2021
Casts and rubbings of scarring on pine trees after resin tapping (carried out in the first half of the 20th century). Over the centuries, resin has played a central role in the global economy, notably as tar for the colonial shipping industry in the 17th and 18th centuries. The scars from the tapping remain for the rest of the tree’s life. The title alludes to the autoimmune diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS), which means multiple scars. The GPS coordinates indicate the position of the pines from which the casts and rubbings were made.
Crying Pine, 2025
The work features a loblolly pine genetically engineered to overproduce resin, which defends the tree against pests and other pathogens. The pine was developed by a biotechnology lab in Florida that sought to commercialise pine resin as a source of renewable energy. However, it turned out that modifying the pine’s immune system threatens to drown the tree in its own protective toxins. The lab’s work has come to a halt due to the unpredictable consequences of releasing such an organism into the wild.
In January 2020, Goldin+Senneby persuaded the lab in Florida to release one of their genetically modified pine saplings for the first time. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved a “containment area” in the home of fiction writer Katie Kitamura in Brooklyn. Since then, Kitamura has been living with the modified pine and working on a novel that tells its story. When the permit expired after five years, the pine was devitalised as prescribed and the remains were cast into a block of pine resin.
About Goldin+Senneby
Goldin+Senneby (since 2004) is an artist duo whose work has explored how economic structures shape our society. In recent years, their practice has increasingly shifted towards questions of care, ecology and the politics of diagnosis. The duo consistently returns to the models, systems and metaphors that structure and frame how we can understand the world. The recurring question for them is how we see rather than what we see.
Goldin+Senneby has exhibited at the biennials in São Paulo, Istanbul and Gwangju; held solo exhibitions at The Power Plant in Toronto, Kadist in Paris, e-flux in New York, and Index, Konsthall C and Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. Their works are included in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Flare-Up will be presented in an adapted version at MIT List Visual Arts Center, USA, opening in the autumn of 2025.
Credits
Curator: Richard Julin
Goldin+Senneby’s collaboration with Kitamura has been commissioned by the art and literature journal Triple Canopy, which has published excerpts from the novel and presented several manifestations of the work since 2020. The project has been funded by the Swedish Research Council (Crying Pine Tree, 2020-2024) with the Royal Institute of Art as host institution, along with additional support from a studio grant at Amant, New York (2022).
Accelerator has collaborated with the Anthropocene Laboratory at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2023. Goldin+Senneby are the first artists to be invited to take part in the lab’s activities and research. The collaboration has resulted in the new series of works After Landscape (2024-2025).
Thanks to Uppsala Art Museum.
The artists would like to thank Fernando Cáceres, Sarali Borg, Sara Ekholm Eriksson, Johan Hjerpe, Ingrid Blix, Mattias Sparf and Hangmen.
