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Four international guest artists are opening their studios during Epidemifredag at Konstepidemin. The event is announced on Konstepidemin’s official website, inviting visitors to pop in, explore the artists’ current projects, talk about art, and, in one of the studios, even get a tattoo.
On Friday, Guest Studio 3 in House 4 will bring together the work of guest artists Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić and Dragan Vojvodić, whose practices begin with ordinary, discarded and second-hand objects found in Gothenburg. Their works approach very different subjects — from ageism, women’s identity and inherited social patterns to memory, sound, political violence and the dissolution of Yugoslavia — while sharing an interest in the stories that objects can carry.
Alongside them, Jules Muck will open Guest Studio Grindstugan, bringing three decades of global graffiti experience into the studio environment. Her presentation includes studio canvases and mural sketches, accompanied by live tattoo sessions and music. Her practice moves between street painting and studio art, from her beginnings as an underground street artist to major international commissions.
At Guest Studio Robert, House 10, artist and educator Justin Cole, based in the US and Spain, will present three new works — a short film and two sound works — exploring climate change, loss and environmental impact. The works combine visual elements from Gothenburg with audio recordings made in places including Svalbard and airports.
In How We Are Cut (found object, 2026), Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić uses second-hand Burda dress patterns purchased at Saronkyrkan Second Hand in Gothenburg. The old patterns become surfaces onto which she imprints everyday ageist narratives addressed to women — narratives that consciously or unconsciously attempt to shape a woman’s life, leaving little space for a fluid, unfinished or undefined identity.
These narratives reflect social expectations that women should be “cut to measure” according to the patterns of traditional society: how they should look, behave, age, and occupy their place in the world.
The old dress patterns point to these inherited social structures while also revealing the separate pieces from which a garment is constructed. In this sense, the work also becomes a reflection on identity itself — on the different, sometimes contradictory aspects from which each of us is composed.
Throughout the Open Studio, Dragan Vojvodić will also present several works, including drawings, collages, and sculptural forms, as part of the installation And the Day Began So Beautifully.
During his residency at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg, Dragan Vojvodić is developing the installation And the Day Began So Beautifully (A dan je tako lijepo počeo, Paraf, Croatia), continuing his research into sound, silence, memory and political violence.
All the materials used in the work — record sleeves, inner sleeves and broken vinyl records — were found in second-hand shops across Gothenburg as used and discarded objects. Objects that once preserved and reproduced sound now become carriers of other stories, while the absence of sound creates a space for memory and reflection on time.
The installation also incorporates drawings the artist made at the age of six, while ill and staying in Cavtat, Croatia, repeatedly depicting conflicts between cowboys and Native Americans. Twenty years later, the same place became a site of actual war. From this personal memory, the work expands towards the history of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed, connecting it to the contemporary world, where war, borders and political violence have once again become an everyday reality.
Personal memory thus enters the space of collective history, while ordinary objects become a kind of archive of violence, borders and time. The title of the work is taken from an album by the Rijeka-based punk band Paraf and, in this new context, acquires an ironic and unsettling meaning.
And the Day Began So Beautifully is an open-ended installation composed of found objects, personal memories and historical fragments, in which what once produced sound now speaks through silence.
The studios and works will be open to visitors from 17:00 to 20:00 during Epidemifredag.
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