The Armory Show, NY: Leif Elggren, Miriam Bäckström

Leif Elggren, is a Swedish artist born 1950, who lives and works in Stockholm and New York. Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer and composer, he has many albums to his credits, solo and with the Sons of God, on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition. His music, often conceived as soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and can range from mesmerizingly quiet electronics to harsh noise. His wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside

Since the mid-1990s, Miriam Bäckström has been one of the most influential artists in the contemporary art scene in Scandinavia. Her work focuses on the staging of life and on the shifts between what we call reality and fiction. In 1995 Miriam Bäckström started the project Set Constructions, a series of photographs depicting sets built for television productions, film commercials and feature films. Her documentations of staged presentations in museums, such as the IKEA museum in Älmhult and the museum apartments of the Stockholm City Museum, started in 1999 and include a photographic series entitled Museums, Collections and Reconstructions. Miriam Bäckström works with photography, text, sound and film. The unspoken and the implicit are strongly present in her works,where different realities often coexist in the same image. We can never be entirely sure of what we see in Miriam Bäckström’s motifs.