Joakim Sandqvist Beckers Art Award 2024

3 February 17 March

Scholar exhibition
Main hall, Färgfabriken

The 37th Beckers Art Award – a grant of 200,000 SEK – as well as exhibitions at Färgfabriken in Stockholm and KKAM – Höganäs, will this year be awarded to Joakim Sandqvist, who was born in 1988 and lives and works in Malmö. He graduated from Malmö Art Academy in 2018.

Joakim Sandqvist explores what influences our perception of the world and its objects – from concrete manipulation to cultural context. As an artist, he works with a wide range of media in a process where the material and its story is essential. Behind each work lies thorough research spanning over a long period, sometimes several years. The artistic work often begins with something ordinary, which, by closer examination, opens up a story and a complex question. It could be a pair of jeans which have been weathered in their manufacture, bricks washed up on a beach, or a piece of paper in the pocket bearing traces of movement.

This is followed by an artistic process involving research into the history of the material and various translations where the content is deconstructed and re-created in a new form. In this way, he makes us reflect upon concepts such as time, space, and authenticity. He often focuses on the relationship between history and our post-industrial world, as seen in works like Façade Test (2024) and Workers, Settlers, Hippies, and Imaginary Lovers (2018).

At Färgfabriken, Joakim Sandqvist’s production is presented for the first time in a cohesive exhibition, where the works reflect and interact with each other. Large-scale sculptures and weaves are exhibited alongside video works, drawings and photographs. The artist has also re-worked some pieces and created new ones, such as Gradient_Grey-Blue (2024), an almost 8-metre-long fabric, depicting the meeting between the analogue and digital worlds.

About the artist

Joakim Sandqvist (b. 1988, in Huskvarna) works in a wide range between the abstract and the concrete. His artistic process often begins in a discovery of something tangible and close at hand, something so common that its meanings are hidden in ordinariness. With thorough research and a strict approach to the work’s dependence on its medium and material components, he creates a restrained poetry that revolves around the interaction between technology and ideology. Sandqvist lives and works in Malmö and has studied at Malmö Art Academy, Slade School of Fine Art and Maumaus Independent Study Program. Sandqvist has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Galleri Ping-Pong, Malmö and Obra, Lund. He has also participated in group shows at Malmö Konsthall and Malmö Konstmuseum.

Portrait of the artist. Photo: Carl-Oskar Jonsson.

Jury’s statement

Joakim Sandqvist unfolds the paper he has carried in his jeans pocket for a few weeks, and the image captures time and place in an unexpected manner. The combination of chance and the artist’s deliberate choices creates both an image and a commentary on the artistic processes, opening up aesthetics, and inviting the world in. By nudging chance along, the artist creates a set of game matrices that generate expressions in a variety of directions.

The interpretation and understanding of maps presuppose that we agree on a set of symbols. In a sense, the map reinvents the world. In this, we can find a metaphor for artistic creation—a journey into unknown landscapes. Sandqvist uses satellite images of American cotton fields. Digital information is fed into the loom, which then weaves a new image of the landscape. The artist combines these images, providing us with yet another version—a narrative that maps the world anew.

Sandqvist depicts how jeans are processed, how bricks are shaped, and how surfaces around us are produced to evoke specific associations. The jeans should be distressed in precisely the right places, the brick should have the correct colour and size, and the clay should come from the right source. He illustrates how the conception of specific conditions takes over, and the original components or authenticity of the content fade into insignificance. Reality becomes a theatre, and materials for new artworks are fixed in the interstices.

Joakim Sandqvist is awarded the Beckers Art Award in 2024, amounting to SEK 200,000, for his artwork that intelligently bears witness to the complexity of meaning-making shifts—from the jeans pocket to outer space and back again. In his practice, he highlights the fragility in translations between different symbols and techniques, turning the artistic process into both a part of the expression and a commentary on the meaningful aspects of the world. His works carry intricate stories and poetry in the transition between the old and the new—the new and the old.

Beckers Art Award was founded in 1987 by Ulf and Viviann Lindén and has since then proven to have a remarkable ability to identify a young talent on the brink of a breakthrough in their careers, such as Jockum Nordström, Dan Wolgers, Nathalie Djurberg and Julia Bondesson. The scholarship aims to support pioneering creative voices in Sweden, and includes a solo exhibition at Färgfabriken and KKAM – Höganäs as well as a prize sum of SEK 200,000.