Klara Källström
Senior Lecturer
The Film, Photography and Literary Composition UnitAbout Klara Källström
Klara Källström is a visual artist, Senior Lecturer in Photography at HDK-Valand, Artistic Faculty, and a PhD candidate in Informatics at the Faculty of Science and Technology.
Her artistic practice explores how images participate in sense-making processes, critically engaging with the seemingly inescapable “dominant narratives” shape our understanding of the world. In long-term collaboration with Thobias Fäldt, her work reactivates photographic material across new temporal, spatial, and material contexts, emphasizing temporal disjunctures and the instability of historical narratives. These reactivations expose the gaps, ruptures, and contradictions inherent in visual and historical representation, particularly in relation to state power and media infrastructures.
Working across documentary practices, investigative aesthetics, and media archaeology, she examines how visual narratives both reinforce and challenge dominant historical interpretations, questioning what is remembered, what is forgotten, and how. Her recent work extends this inquiry into the algorithmic domain, analysing how AI-generated imagery and image annotation reshape visual archives and influence the interpretation of images in computational contexts. This is explored as a collective process both pedagogically and within the gallery space.
Källström’s PhD project investigates how socio-technical practices such as annotation, classification, and categorisation materialise institutional categories into actionable forms that reconfigure governance, power, and accountability. Through illustrative cases within state agencies, she explores how visual data and digital archives are operationalised across infrastructures, revealing how algorithmic systems claim efficiency and objectivity while entrenching asymmetries of power and eroding democratic oversight.
Källström and Fäldt are the founders of the publishing platform B-B-B-Books (2011) and the gallery project FG2 in Gothenburg (2018), both serving as sites for artistic inquiry. Their books are part of museum collections worldwide, including Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), Hasselblad Foundation (Gothenburg), LACMA (Los Angeles).
Their works have been exhibited internationally at Unseen (Amsterdam), the Hasselblad Foundation (Gothenburg), Bunkier Sztuki (Krakow Photomonth), Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest), Le Bal and Photo Saint Germain (Paris), LACMA (Los Angeles), Aperture Foundation (New York), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), CFF/Center for Photography, and Fotografiska (Stockholm).
Exhibitions (2025):
• GIBCA Extended 2025, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (Sweden)
• Sandviken Konsthall (Sweden)
• Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen (Denmark)
• Camera Austria, Graz (Austria)
• The Hole, New York City, US
• Havremagasinet, Boden, Sweden
Recent exhibitions:
• MLZ & Wiener Art Foundation, Trieste, Italy (2024)
• Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden (2024 + 2023)