Karin Keisu (1995, Juoksengi) and Josse Thuresson (1992, Stockholm) are an artist duo based between Stockholm and Tornedalen. They received their MFA in Fine Art from Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in 2022.
Since 2018, Keisu and Thuresson work collaboratively across multiple media, including moving image, performance, text, and sculpture. Working through their respective languages, Meänkieli and Swedish Sign Language, they examine Sweden’s colonial history, the politics of language, and the ways in which the construction of the nation-state produces and enforces notions of the “desirable” citizen. By tracing parallel histories of minoritized communities, their artistic research approaches systems of exotification and assimilation, as well as strategies of resistance, as shared, collective experiences rather than isolated or oppositional narratives. Their artistic practice articulates the power of existing at the margins; insisting on queerness, opacity, gaps, silences, poetry, contradiction, and playfulness.
In 2024 Keisu and Thuresson were artists in residence at IASPIS (Stockholm). Their work have been presented in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg), 69 (Oslo), Aine Art Museum (Tornio), Österängens Konsthall (Österängen), Kin Museum for Contemporary Art (Kiruna). Selected group exhibitions include Night Festival (Korpilombolo), Havremagasinet (Boden), Sandvikens konsthall (Sandviken), BO (Oslo), Luleå Biennial (Luleå); Kunsthall Trondheim (Trondheim); Young Arctic Artists (Rovaniemi and Alta). They are recipients of the Konstfack Principal’s Grant (2022), and the Kino der Kunst Project Award (2020), and their works are held in the collections of Public Art Agency Sweden, Kin Museum for Contemporary Art, and Aine Art Museum.