Zoey Hart and Maja Andersson

Seeking comfort

Multimedia visual/performance collaboration between Maja Anderson, Zoey Hart, their respective bodies, and the surrounding landscape. 

In Seeking Comfort, the pair works with body and landscape to build a visual narrative of life with chronic illness: alternating between different scales of time and states of fatigue, the feeling of constant heaviness against the pace of our social networks and natural worlds. 

In this initial work, stone represents externalized sensations of the body. We each carry a heavy stone, repositioning it on our bodies as we move across the stone landscape. Our bodies seek spaces of momentary stillness, as the sea moves quickly and steadily around us. Through trial and error of moving, settling, and re-settling, we perform the question: can we adapt to our bodily need for rest in a world that devalues slowness? 

We were each invited by curator Anna Viola Halberg to create work at Bjorkö Konstnod during the summer of 2022. As both of our works resonate with the experience of the unwell body through performance and artistic documentation, we quickly brought our bodies together in collaboration with the local landscape to amplify our collective need for rest (see: seeking comfort). 

Zoey Hart (Brooklyn, NY) comes from a background in interdisciplinary visual art and social practice (MA NYU 2015). She has worked closely with the Disability Arts community in NYC, and other socially engaged artist groups in Brooklyn and beyond. She previously directed Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency. Her focus is to work between the body and environment, relating bodies and natural spaces through themes of Care, Diagnosis, and Healing.
http://www.zoeyAhart.com

Maja Andersson is a visual artist, with the body as a central part of her practice. She has worked with performance art and is continuously exploring different mediums and forms of expression. She uses video, photography, fabrics, clay, sometimes in combination. The point of entry to her work is feelings as a state of mind, or a physical feeling in the body. By entering these feelings and sensations, she explores what is inside of us, and how we relate to it – willingly or unwillingly. 

https://www.anderssonmaja.com/