BANG UP MY LIFE

Of Public Interest, Lövholmen, Sweden 2026

 

Performance by Runa Alakoski, Cornelia Isaksson and Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski for OPI Lab, a hub for experimental artistic and architectural practice-based thinking and doing. The Lab operates as an advanced course that is held at the Department for Research and Further Education in Architecture and Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

 

Curated by Lauren Johnson

See documentation here

 

Perhaps the low tolerance for disagreement that can be observed in local, global, and medial society today, is what generates accelerating political polarization. Perhaps polarization decelerates said tolerance.

 

It might also be true — like the epos that will be presented at OPI Open Door Sessions on 15 January suggests — that reductive, rigid, latent and explosive disagreements alike, ultimately manifest a deeper anxiety about the loss of meaningful human interconnection. Would it be hard to disagree if it wasn’t painful to be mentally misaligned with others? Might the art of loving disagreement be forgotten in an increasingly alienated, echo chambered society? When people cannot honourably disagree, disagreements cannot generate synthesis. On the menu is only more disagreement. Progressives stop progressing.

 

A fragmented, compressed, and condensed epos by Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Cornelia Isaksson, and Runa Alakoski will be presented for the night. It will take the shape of three acts of a performance. Shorter than the many lifetimes traditionally required to fill an epic poem, Bang Up My Life, nonetheless presents the viewer with a few important lessons. Its multiple moral positions seep out through two voices which happen to belong to two sisters. These voices could also impersonate two crucial life companions: the self and its greatest ideological opponent.

 

Bang Up My Life and its thinking with conflict finds a natural resonance in the context of OPI Lab, a practice-based research environment and an advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. OPI Lab centers artistic language in public space and insists that these spaces hold many, especially conflicting, voices and intentions.

 

Text by Lauren Johnson & Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski