Klara Källström
Universitetslektor
Enheten för film, fotografi och litterär gestaltningOm 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 processes of sense-making and how visual material contributes to the formation of prevailing narratives. Developed over many years in collaboration with artist Thobias Fäldt, the work draws on archival and mediatic images that are reactivated across changing temporal, spatial, and material contexts. Over time, this has formed an extensive working archive marked by temporal disjunctions and shifting relations between past and present, allowing gaps, contradictions, and unresolved meanings to remain visible, particularly in relation to state power and media infrastructures.
Her work engages documentary practices, investigative aesthetics, and media archaeology, attending to how visual narratives shape what is remembered, forgotten, and rendered legible. Recent projects extend this inquiry into algorithmic image production, examining how AI-generated imagery and annotation practices affect visual archives and influence interpretation in computational contexts. These questions are explored through collective processes in both pedagogical settings and exhibition formats, including the ongoing workshop and exhibition series Annotation Fever!, developed in collaboration with media theorist and historian of technology Bernard Geoghegan, artist Thomas Savin, and the Beijing Silvermine archive.
Källström’s PhD research examines annotation, classification, and categorisation as socio-technical practices through which institutional categories take operational form. Focusing on visual data and digital archives within state and administrative contexts, the project investigates how algorithmic systems are mobilised through claims of efficiency and objectivity, and how these deployments reshape governance, accountability, and power.
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 Camera Austria (Graz), 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 (2026):
• Camera Austria, Graz (Austria)
• Fotografiska Shanghai (The Beijing Silvermine Archive)
Recent exhibitions:
• Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen (Denmark)
• GIBCA Extended 2025, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (Sweden)
• The Hole, New York City, US
• Sandviken Konsthall (Sweden)
• Havremagasinet, Boden, Sweden
• MLZ & Wiener Art Foundation, Trieste, Italy (2024)
• Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden (2024 + 2023)