Author name: Natalia Muntean

Alexandra Karpilovski is knocking at her door Written by Natalia Muntean Photo by Elvira Glänte “It’s about looking for yourself, trying to find your place,” says Swedish artist Alexandra Karpilovski. I met her amid the creative chaos of building her show’s universe, Howling to My Window and Knocking at My Door. My initial impression of chaos gave way to certainty: she knew exactly what she wanted to do. “I make a plan during the process, but it usually comes quite late,” Karpilovski tells me. Her process rests on intuition – a belief that each impulse carries its own reason. “I have things I want to make, and then maybe something else along the way evolves into something different. It’s very intuition-based and from my own heart.”  The title itself sounds like an instinct, something raw, almost animalistic. It began, she explains, with a painting she made years ago, Howling to My Window, that she never showed. After a period when life was intense and took another turn, she added Knocking at my door. Karpilovski keeps a mental archive of words and fragments until they find a place in her art. “The part I added really spoke to me because it’s like I’m knocking at my own door,” she says.  The show’s DNA grows from her paintings, words, painted lamps, and fabrics, but equally from the small objects she’s gathered across her life: pieces from her grandparents’ estate, her travels, or secondhand shops. When she began preparing for this show, life had unmoored her, and she didn’t quite know how to begin again. Her way back into work was simple, almost ritualistic. “My daily thing was just walking,” she says. “I would go to a thrift store and just find things I feel a small connection to, even without knowing why. But then they somehow fall into place.”  Tenderness runs through Karpilovski’s process – in the way she collects and arranges, giving space to what might be overlooked. In a poignant contrast to the visceral title, the act of choosing becomes a quiet conversation between what remains and what’s been lost.  “They may seem silly, but then they become special. They accompany the works for me. They bring a physical, human touch because somebody had them before.” For Alexandra, exhibiting her work is about finding connection: “I think this is what we all want.” The works, she notes, represent different emotional states, her brushstrokes navigating the space where humour and gravity meet. “I take things from myself, but I think there are a lot of universal things that people can connect to.”  The exhibition is on view October 10–19, 2025, at Doubble Space, a venue housed in a former gasworks with raw concrete walls and dramatic light, a setting both industrial and ghostly. “You have to embrace it as it is,” Alexandra says. She saw the space as a psychological ‘alley,’ a journey that starts airy and moves toward the heavier emotions, creating a sense of flow where visitors wander through different states of mind. The works, she explains, act “like windows, looking into people’s different situations.” To complete the experience, a forty-five-minute sound composition threads through the exhibition, made with her friend Danilo Colonna for their music project, Private Parts. “I wanted to create a gathering place, a moment of joy,” she says.  Born in 1988 in Kyiv, Karpilovski says she doesn’t remember drawing much as a child, but recalls a defining moment at seventeen when she saw Marie-Louise Ekman’s Hello, Baby, a work that sparked something in her. She later studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and spent several years abroad. Now, returning to Stockholm feels like a homecoming after years of movement.  Alexandra’s wish for those who see Howling to My Window and Knocking at My Door is simple: “I hope they leave with a sense of openness – to feel more, relax and loosen up. And maybe they might go on their own journey within themselves.” Recreating spaces, stages and scenes.  Through shifting states, we walk this way, where lines will blur and drift away.
Where in meets out, and ends begin, where dreams and choices lie within. There’s clarity, a trace of might, 
Long sleepless hours before the light. 
We watch, we walk, we let things go, we dare, we reach, we let it show Alone is where we once were two 
Just for a moment — something true. Alexandra Karpilovski

The Art of Resistance: A Conversation with Carouschka Streijffert For over five decades, artist Carouschka Streijffert has made her mark within the Swedish art scene, working at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and scenography. In a world saturated with the new and the digital, Streijffert’s practice is a testament to the poetry of the discarded. She does not simply reuse materials; she listens to their history, taming cast-off fragments of metal, wood, and paper into objects, giving them new meaning. As Drivkraftens seger över motståndet (The Victory of Urge over Resistance) opens at RAVINEN Kulturhus, we talked to an artist for whom creation is a vital, almost philosophical act. The exhibition is titled “The Victory of Urge over Resistance.” What does “resistance” mean to you in your creative process? Is it a physical property of the materials, a mental state, or both?It is in the psychological resistance that creativity arises. It is in the friction, in the complexity, that the work grows, takes shape, is born, and comes into being. To eliminate resistance is to embrace laziness, and then the result becomes polite and empty. To create is presence – a driving force that shows direction. You are alive. You exist. For over five decades, your work has centred on reclaimed and found objects. What is the “call” you feel from a discarded piece of metal, wood, or paper? What makes you know an object has a place in your art?The world is flooded with used-up material, and it’s hard to ignore. I choose to see the possibilities in the discarded, details of beauty, regardless of the material’s properties. My aesthetic brings together the fragments, a dialogue between the hand and the gaze. The feeling of holding and weighing the discarded in my hands, of not wasting matter already charged with obscure experiences. I tame and shape the cast-off into an existence in the present. A collage. A sculptural object. The passion reflects my feelings, experiences, and memories. Portrait taken by Thoron Ullberg Your practice spans art, architecture, and scenography. How does your thinking about space and environment influence the individual objects you create, and vice versa?I create for the person who inhabits the spatial environment. It’s about proportions, the individual in the space. What is the room going to be used for? Here, function is the guiding factor. The financial framework, the size of the surfaces, and the amount of light entering. Is it a permanent room? A temporary room? A scenographic design has the task of framing or enhancing a drama. Scenography is meant to help the actor in the performance and give the viewer, the audience, a visual enhancement. Here, there are no boundaries. Architecture is a form of mathematics, logical analysis. The building, its function, reflects the volume of the rooms and how they interact with each other. The façade and the interior are in dialogue. The visual and functional expression of the materials should strengthen the human presence in the architectural space. Your work is described as both “raw” and “precise.” How do you balance intuitive, raw expression with the technical skill and precision of a craftsperson?A determined skill of interaction between my hands and a sharp eye. The visual must constantly speak to me. Analogue work has been performed by humanity since our beginnings. That talent must not be destroyed or erased. Intuition and skill arise and are maintained through constant practice, and then the difficult becomes a certainty of precision. The simple, bare, and obvious can be interpreted as rawness. Something that is not hidden or disguised by external cosmetics is automatically natural beauty, a form of truth that speaks to us. Much of your work feels like a preservation of memory and history. Do you see yourself as an archivist of sorts, giving a new life to the fragments of our time?Humour and playfulness are constantly connected to the seriousness of my artistry. Valuation and selection are continuously applied in my search for why and how to transform the urban waste into a new existence. This pursuit and stewardship are similar to an archivist’s logical sorting of the past. I house my finds in self-built archives, with a structure based on the qualities, colours, and properties of the materials. It is in these collections that I can repeatedly pick and replenish from the treasure trove of lost and found objects, year after year. The creation is endless. It becomes my own decay that will eventually bring a brutal end to the creativity of documentation. In an age of mass production and digital saturation, why do you believe your analogue, hands-on approach feels so relevant and urgent to contemporary audiences?The movements of the hand, the tempo, create reflection, not nostalgia, but trust. Craftsmanship requires time, a tactile substance. Not like our world’s clicking in front of glaring screens, where we are bombarded and slip off the rapid-fire impressions we rarely can avoid. This makes us blind and deaf to actual reality. Mass production and endless online shopping of unnecessary products will deteriorate our mental health and the Earth’s resources. Thousands of massive cargo ships float daily in our oceans, filled to the brim with newly manufactured “trash.” Why? Humanity has forgotten that the hand is our best tool. Working analogue today is not a retreat but a direction forward.