Arvida Byström

Arvida Byström describes herself as a ‘digital native with an intrinsic relationship to pink.’ Exploring femininities and its complexities, often tied to online culture, she travels in an aesthetic universe of disobedient bodies, selfie sticks and fruits in lingerie. Her photography and endless Instagram scroll has been in art shows all over the world as she starred both behind and in front of the camera of numerous influential brands and magazines including Adidas, Gucci, Absolut Vodka, i-D magazine, H&M, Polaroid originals, Urban outfitters and many more.

This self-taught, and according to Wonderland Magazine, ‘artist, photographer, model, cyber sensation and all-round Swedish babe’, has also, from her various bases alternating between Stockholm, London and Los Angeles, collaborated with further international magazines and brands like Wonderland Magazine, Lula Magazine, Rookie, Garage Magazine,Baby Baby Baby Magazine, I heart Magazine, Nasty Gal and Monki.

Byström started taking pictures, aged twelve, with a digital camera, and took a lot of selfies to “know the truth about how the world sees you”. Initially inspired by, microblogging and social networking website, Tumblr, she started posting pictures on her account, taking part in a community of female artists questioning femininity and gender standards, using a so-called “girly” aesthetic and “girly coded stuff”. Byström also took pictures about period-related things in the series There Will Be Blood, published in Vice, on 17 May 2012.

Anastasiia Fedorova characterizes Byström in the following way in, an early interview with the artist (‘Sugar-coated intimates. Arvida Bystrom on why the internet’s “panty fetish” is an art world analogy’, DAZED, 11 December 2013):

Arvida Byström is the Internet’s pink-haired princess, flying around her kingdom on a rainbow unicorn, almost. Actually, she’s a 22-year old Stockholm-born photographer and artist, now based in London. She explores sexuality, self-identity and contemporary feminism. Bystrom grew up with a compact digital camera in hand and selfies as an expression of her teenage girl identity. Now a full-grown artist, she uses teenage aesthetics to tackle the difficulties of adult life. She exploits girly things to destroy the concept of being pretty and steps into dangerous territory of taboo topics including period and body hair. Jelly shoes suddenly become a fetish object, pop up windows and smartphones are just a new frame for art.

Byström then moved to London to become more independent. She made her first fashion series for Monki and created her own gallery space, GAL, with fellow photographer and friend Hanna Antonsson. Through GAL they curated emerging artists for one-night shows. In spite of this, Byström still positioned herself as being more a part of popular culture than the art world. As a member of the female collective The Ardorous, Byström presented some of her photographs in Babe – a book published in May 2015, including the work of 30 other female artists, curated by Petra Collins.

The same year, Byström took part in the exhibition Girls At Night On The Internet, curated by Grace Miceli, together with artists such as Petra Collins, Molly Soda and Maggie Dunlap. The show dealt with the misrepresentation of young artists in the art world and showcased their work. Byström later created a performance with the artist Maja Malou Lyse (whom she originally had met in Copenhagen in 2009), which was called Selfie Stick Aerobics, a tutorial, in the shape of a five-minute clip ‘packed with radical self-love and and so much pink. So much’, aimed to teach participants how to take better selfies while accepting their bodies to make them feel beautiful. Byström’s collaborator Lyse explained (in Priscilla Frank’s article ‘Selfie Stick Aerobics Is A Fun & Subtle Way To Promote Body Positivity. Photogenic feminists, Selfie Stick Aerobics has arrived’, Huffington Post, 14 October 2015):

We view selfies as an effective medium for self-expression and a tool for resisting the male-dominated media culture. […] By reclaiming the feminine identity and female body -- taking ownership of our own images instead of subjecting themselves to the male gaze. In this sense, a selfie can be a radical act of political empowerment.

In 2017 Byström, and Molly Soda, released a book about Instagram censorship, called Pics or It Didn’t Happen: Images Banned from Instagram. The book, that was published in Swedish the following year, contained 270 images that had previously been deleted from Instagram. Pics Or It Didn’t Happen: Images banned from Instagram exposes, as pointed out by Grace Banks (‘Pics Or It Didn’t Happen: reclaiming Instagram’s censored art’, The Guardian, 10 April 2017):

an ominous flaw in Instagram’s community guidelines: women are getting an extremely hard time. ‘For a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity on Instagram,’ the guidelines read – and yet its bare chested men remain largely uncensored, while topless images of women are guaranteed to be deleted. And it is not only nipples: when Soda and Byström asked their combined 207,600 Instagram followers for examples of censored images, the book explains: ‘We began to see patterns in the types of images that had been subjected to censorship.’ Overwhelmingly, the photos are of female nipples, vaginal secretions and body hair. Presented together, Pics Or It Didn’t Happen demonstrates how taboo very ordinary elements of female bodies, such as hair, fat and blood, have become. ‘The stuff I’ve had taken down was never explicitly sexual,’ Molly says. ‘But the thing is, when you have a picture removed, it immediately sexualises it.’

Since it launched in 2010, Instagram has helped to democratise the art world, making it possible for young women from different backgrounds to take a spot in a famously masculine industry, promote their work, and find recognition. Many of the women in Pics Or It Didn’t Happen: Images banned from Instagram have done just that, but frustratingly enough as, once again, pointed out by Grace Banks:

the book is very white. ‘It was mostly white women that sent us images after we made the callout for banned pictures,’ says Byström. ‘What’s in the book is representative of what we were sent, which I think says a lot about the state of the art world.’ And, as Byström is quoted in the foreword: ‘White, abled, cis young women, often pretty thin … These types of people tend to feel more entitled to their bodies.’ The lack of non-cisgender women, and women of colour, is something that should be noted and challenged. But in making a book out of these removed online works, whether you think the photos are good or not, the authors have created an archival document with its own artistic criteria, delivering a deleted contemporary art movement into the hands of those who shun it. ‘As a historical document, the book is interesting,’ says Byström. ‘In 10 years, things will be different. Instagram probably won’t even exist.’

Selected solo exhibitions include Wifi or wife, Bon Gallery, Stockholm (2014); Frenemy, Absolut Art Bar, Stockholm (2018); Cherry Picking, Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm, (2018); Cherry Picking, Gallery Kranjcar, Zagreb, Croatia (2018); Inflated Fiction, Fotografiska, Stockholm (2018 – 2019) and, most recently, Cut the Cake, Dunker cultural center, Helsingborg, Sweden (2024).

The 2024 exhibition at Dunker was reviewed by SVT’s (Sweden’s national public broadcasting company) prominent art critic Dennis Dahlqvist, noting how: “Byström’s work reflects our time – with social media, celebrity hysteria, self-fixation and AI – in a sickly accurate way. Not bad for a completely self-taught artist who started her career with a photo blog on Instagram.”

Copyright Firestorm Foundation