No Never

No Never is a two-channel video installation by Annika Eriksson commissioned by anorak for September Sessions, Stockholm. The work approaches a consciousness without language, channeling its logic and structure.

The first view is a close-up frame of a cat. Between viewer and viewfinder a connection is established and then wanders. The cat contains the qualities of dependency and a radical, non-negotiable autonomy—an end-of-the-line secrecy. The second shot follows the line of this movement, bringing representation onto a necessary path of abstraction, with a focus on a radically different subjectivity.

The diptych form is crucial here: a wall simultaneously separates and holds both projections. The first video anchors us in encounter; the second disfigures, transgressing and demarcating the threshold where depiction turns into interpretation. No Never fuses an act of refusal with a sense of ongoing time—a negation that lingers. Refusal here is not closure but a leap of faith into imagination, probing how images might attend to a subject resisting translation.

The artist’s long standing practice of observation has been driven by, and toward, the asymmetries of looking and being looked at. Moving through aesthetic registers of the moving image, including documentary film, surveillance, speculative fiction, and animation, Eriksson’s work examines how subjects perform under observation, and how behaviour speaks not only of the individual but of the social scripts from which it emerges. Earlier works deliberately used a single wide-angle shot, in which social constellations unfolded as tableaux—punks, cats, dogs, cosplayers, the staff of art institutions—unmasking roles ascribed, learned, inhabited, and at times corrupted. Despite the camera’s uninvolved stillness and ostensibly clinical set-up, the compositions recall Renaissance painting rather than film’s claim to ‘record reality’. Eriksson’s camera is never a neutral recorder; it frames relations and makes the viewer complicit in the act of looking, often with a voyeuristic charge that unsettles appeals to ‘authenticity’ or ‘objectivity’ as governing criteria often applied to observational images. Instead, a sustained inquiry into portraiture recurs as a mode and question: how to attend to others without presuming to know them?

The opening will be followed by a conversation at Cues with the artist and curators Johanna Markert and Lukas Ludwig (anorak).

Annika Eriksson is from Malmö, Sweden and lives in Berlin. At the center of her artistic practice is an interest in social interaction: how do we live together, what kind of societies do we create, and what happens at the margins or in the transition from one order to another? Her projects recurrently engage with relations between humans and other animals; of our interdependence, slippages and connection, but also registers of violation, and disregard. She has exhibited since the early 1990s, including at the biennales of Istanbul, Venice, São Paulo, and Shanghai, and at institutions such as Bonner Kunstverein; Tate Liverpool; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Hayward Gallery, London; and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Stockholm, amongst others.

Annika Eriksson, No Never, 2025

2-channel video installation

Edit: Ben Brix

Commissioned by anorak for September Sessions

September Sessions was initiated in 2023 by art organisations Index and Mint with an ambition to celebrate the diversity of the Stockholm art scene and to create a platform for international curators, temporarily transforming the city with programs at new and unexpected places. The four-day festival presents exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings and social gatherings, this year hosted by the local organisations Accelerator, Beau Travail, Bonniers Konsthall, Filmform, IASPIS, Index, Konsthall C, Liljevalchs, MEGA Foundation and MDT. Alongside these events, the festival presents Houred Time at Mint, Antics and Cues, curated by anorak.