ARTIST STATEMENT

Eli Lindén’s photographic works and films explore bodies, desire, and the threshold between vulnerability and control, allowing space for tenderness and pleasurable trust. The personal is political. Through a queer gaze on the body, radical power-play becomes political subversion - an intentional arena created to allow both the object and the viewer to exist beyond self-censorship, shame and societal taboos.

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This creative practice is intimately intertwined with Lindén’s curatorial work, where the same norm-critical questions and playfulness take shape within the exhibition space, while allowing beauty and aesthetic pleasure to exist in their own right. Over the past two decades, Lindén has worked within both roles to build an academically grounded and research-driven queer archivism.

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The artistic practice centers on photography, film, and moving image, with historical roots in sketching, painting, and text. The mobile phone camera is deliberately chosen as the primary tool. By stripping away the distance created by heavy studio equipment, Lindén steps entirely inside the private sphere, dissolving the boundary between them self and the person being photographed. Who physically holds the camera during a session becomes secondary. At times, the camera is handed over and the artist becomes the objekt. The process becomes a circular gaze where the boundary between subject and object is blurred to instead document a genuine trust and emotional intimacy.

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​In parallel, Lindén explores the generative digital space through AI-generated image series. This allows for a distortion regarding bodies and desire in a different way than the photographic work; it becomes a means to push the boundary of what defines a body and how it can be manifested. Through the algorithm, shape is given to deeply human, naturalistic portraits of sensuality and norm-breaking, where the human aspects break through the digital sharpness and are fixated within spatial image installations.

Lindén's gaze primarily seeks out forest and urban environments. However, the focus is rarely on the scenic or on beautiful vistas, but rather on the presence of the body, where elements such as water, soil, wood, plastic, concrete, and tactile textures are utilized to ground and fixate the physical experience within spatial image installations.

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Eli Lindén has been active within the international queer art movement for over two decades. Their work spans across Europe and Asia, deeply rooted in independent networks and artist-run platforms - from KunstKaserneBerlin to Supermarket Art Fair at Kulturhuset in Stockholm and The Substation in Singapore. This practice has been widely documented and featured in national public broadcasting and major press, alongside critical contributions to cultural publications such as Bang, Ottar, and Konstnären.

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In previous artistic and curatorial endeavors, Eli Lindén has operated under the name Elinore Lindén Strand.​