Born Sweden,1979, lives and works in Berlin.
Nina Canell’s work, in general, deals with invisible energies made apparent. Inheriting core tenets from Fluxus, her work is situated somewhere between established, static sculpture and the performativity of natural events or occurrences. Her recent sculptures employ fragments or ‘cuttings’ from high voltage cables, which first emerged in her significant 2014 solo shows at Camden Arts Centre, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and formed the core of her presentation at Art Basel, Hong Kong, have been perfectly described in a recent text from a show at the Dutch institution, Witte de With:
“The work of Nina Canell attempts to activate an intersection between humans, objects and events whereby a certain kind of material imagination might be articulated. A method of loosely combining found or unrelated materials is central to her practice. Triggering situations, they encourage us to think of a place where something can be shared, altered or set off in an unexpected direction. Nina Canell meditates upon the loss of information and energy that occurs during processes of transference in her sculptural constellation of stumps and cross-sections of telecommunication and power cables, each becoming sentences cut-off mid-flow or instances of material forgetfulness.”
Nina Canell is one of six artists who collectively represented Norway, Sweden, and Finland for a joint project titled Mirrored in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017. Recent solo exhibition activities include: Future Mechanism Rag Plus Two Grams, SIMIAN, Copenhagen (2024);
Tectonic Tender, Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art, Berlin (2022); Muscle Memory at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and Drag-Out, at 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco (both 2019). Canell has also held solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2018); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2018); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017), Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine (2017), Unlimited, Art 47 Basel (2016), Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2015), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2014), Camden Arts Centre, London (2014), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2014), Lunds Konsthall, Sweden (2014), Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2013), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, (2012), Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2011), Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Vienna (2010). Her work has also featured in major international group exhibitions, including Nothing is Lost. Art and Matter in Transformation, GAMeC, Bergamo; La vie Moderne, 13th Biennale de Lyon; 18th Biennale, Sydney; La Triennale, Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; On Line, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Liverpool Biennale, Tate Liverpool; Manifesta 7, Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol; 7th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju. Canell’s work is held in major private and public collections worldwide and featured in numerous monographs and publications.