Éva Mag
Lycka är när sagan besannas
May 6 – June 17, 2023

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

From the poem Nothing Twice by Wislawa Szymborska, from Calling out to Yeti, 1957

What would be the strategy for a human who has always been in search of another’s elusive identity? When time has veiled the past and the truths of childhood becomes uncertain, – how do you find someone’s essence when the clues are to be found in what has been, and no longer attainable?

One way could be to enter the world with your own fiction. As in Éva Mag’s case, – to tell stories with sculptures, photographs, objects, installations and performances. In her work, she has created an internal cycle where the care of what has already been done is central, and change and transformation of the same is a must. With the scenes in Lycka är när sagan besannas (Happiness is when the fairy tale comes true), Mag presents variations of the unfathomable in a human being, a spectrum of what she describes as “a woman’s different states.”

Éva Mag was born in 1979 in Miercurea-Ciuic, Transylvania. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Stockholm, where she received her artistic education at the Royal Institute of Art. Mag works with narratives about the body, both the human and the sculptural, and in particular its amorphous forms. Her practice also includes an archive of the working process, and she is engaged with the social aspects of art, such as workshops, choreography, dance and performance. In 2019 she staged the performance “Dead Matter Moves” for Performa 19 in New York. Mag was featured in her largest solo exhibition to date, ‘Det finns en plan för det här’, at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, in the spring of 2020, a version of which was shown at Galleri Riis in Oslo that same year. In 2021, she presented ceramic sculptures in a pop-up exhibition with Galleri Riis at POMP Space in Stockholm and staged a new performance for “Disappearing Berlin”, produced by Schinkel Pavillion in Berlin. In March 2023, she staged her most recent performance, “Verksamhetsanalysen” at Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö.