Dissertation in artistic research, fine arts
512 pages + DVD with five video works
Introduction in English
Essays in English / Swedish
Graphic design: Emma Corkhill
Publisher: Art Monitor, Gothenburg

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You Told Me is a practice-based research project and consists of three video biographies (the Who is…? series), and two video essays (Kumiko, Johnnie Walker & the Cute (2007), Madame & Little Boy (2009)), anintroduction with a contextualization and methodology of the field, and three essays.

This dissertation in artistic research is grounded in the You Told Me-situation and certain resonances of the act and context of utterance. Fundamental to the work are meetings, conversations and storytelling activities that are closely linked to the biographical genre, but also to the oral dissemination of artworks. Work story is a concept that points to the stories about the making of art, the very sequence of actions that inform the work, and the order of the actions within the sequence practically, symbolically, ethically, metonymically, metaphorically…

You Told Me is also about the making of video essays about listening and talking to images, and making transferences between the working instances of narrative video. Video essays, like work stories, do not just give an account of their own orbit of production, but they also reflect on their own choices of method and subject matter as well as their own contingent nature. The video essays and work stories in this book privilege the meaning of the local, the situated, the neglected detail, the personal pronoun, the individual’s body and its experience of pleasure and pain, and the striking repetition among people and in history. These singularities, and their mundane and fantastic stories, are formed by, inscribed in and producing our social and political realms.