Others Will Know by Miriam Bäckström

Others Will Know by Miriam Bäckström is a mesmerizing long-term installation gracing the lower-level lobby of Buffalo AKG Art Museum in upstate New York. As part of a year-long celebration featuring newly commissioned works for 2023, this art piece transforms a simple photograph of a textile swatch into an expansive and immersive tapestry.

The captivating woven tapestry stretches across 11 Kvadrat Soft Cells Broadline panels, each shaped in diverse geometries, for a total length of 36.5 meters. Achieving a flawless integration with the complex, curved architecture of the Buffalo AKG’s Jeffrey E. Gundlach building was made possible by the Kvadrat Acoustics team, utilizing a form-finding algorithm to calculate precise curvatures. Kvadrat Acoustics developed an innovative installation system based on custom corner brackets with non-orthogonal corners, perfectly adapting to the unique angles and intersections of space.

To bring Others Will Know to life, Bäckström initially lit and photographed the textile swatch at high resolution, capturing every nuance of its colour and structure. The multi-layered fabric, originally designed for bathing suits, intrigued Bäckström with its woven colours and foil layer pattern reminiscent of concentric circles found in traditional lighthouse Fresnel lenses. These layered qualities play a crucial role in achieving the desired illusion of depth, transparency, three-dimensionality, and light in the artwork.
Miriam Bäckström's creative process also involved using 3D technology and virtual reality to transform the textile swatch into a photographic curvilinear sculpture. By collaborating with skilled weavers in the Netherlands and the Kvadrat Acoustics team, Bäckström translated her imaginative world into a magnificently coloured, seemingly infinite wall-mounted tapestry that pushes the limits of photography.

Impossibly dense, magnificently coloured, and seemingly infinite, the experience Bäckström has crafted invites every visitor to Others Will Know to embark on a journey of deciphering this new world for themselves.

Buffalo AKG Art Museum
1285 Elmwood Avenue
Buffalo, NY 14222

On view until 25 May 2024

Monday, 10 am–5 pm
Tuesday – Wednesday, Closed
Thursday – Friday, 10 am–8 pm 
Saturday – Sunday, 10 am–5 pm

 

About Miriam Bäckström

Miriam Bäckström is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm. She emerged as an artist in the late 1990s and was most notable for using the approaches of documentary photography to expose and undo conventions of depiction and storytelling. The conceptual and visual precision of her photographic work soon gained wide international recognition, not least after Harald Szeemann included it in the Venice Biennale in 1999.

Miriam Bäckström's images of empty interiors tell of stories in which the individual is absent. Film sets, museum displays and apartments become "figures" speaking of the "diverse characters" that are as yet physically absent in the images. They link to Miriam Bäckström's interest about how history is told and processes of creating and recreating memory using photography, text, theatre, and video. Many of her more recent works explore the documentary and the fictional, interweaving narratives that create new and uncertain realities and identities.

 

About Buffalo AKG Art Museum

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) is one of the oldest museums dedicated to contemporary art, and the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. It was founded in December 1862 as the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy with former President Millard Fillmore among its incorporators. Throughout its evolution to the Albright Art Gallery, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and now the Buffalo AKG, the museum has been led by a series of talented and dedicated directors whose combined influence has given rise to an extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art.