Elna Dani Liljedahl

“I work with experiences, traces left inside me, and traces left in the external world. I then transform these into something to show: new imprints, marks, echoes. I work in several different mediums, including music, sound, performance, video, drawing, tattooing, printmaking, set design, costume making and installation. The traces of an action, the documentation of the movement. Movement as flowing water, energy in motion.”

For Elna Dani Liljedahl, the line between life and art is a thin one – one that has almost dissolved. Sounds, music, voices, rituals… their own voice, body and interactions with the surroundings are as important as the set designs, textile sculptures, tattoos and music that Liljedahl creates. The expression of their own body is thus intertwined with fellow artists and band members, with friends and with us, the audience.

In Liljedahl’s art, we are invited to question categories and predetermined norms of behaviour. Here, there is an artistic tradition; a chain in which Liljedahl is a link. One example is the Situationists of the 1960s, who criticised the conformity of modern industrial society. They paid tribute to the playful human, Homo Ludens, and saw play as an alternative to work and consumption. In a similar way, Elna Dani’s art points towards being together as an active act in order to find community around being amused, moved, worried or delighted. A call to live life to the full, and where nature is also a relationship to cherish.

Liljedahl’s art thereby moves in the opposite direction to the state of despair that often characterises our time. A gesture of generosity, of hope, and of faith in the genuineness of life.