Preview: Ruby Nilsson: RECANTATION

Opening 10 September, Ruby Nilsson’s exhibition RECANTATION transforms Index into a ritualistic setting for her new video work of the same name. Nilsson confronts visitors through a grim economic science fiction, a worldbuild that explores a compromised and uncomfortable future of transsexual labor. Here, the artist follows the dark poetics of trans misogyny and unleashes it in all its unsettling and amoral glory; a move that can be read as a critique of what she regards as deeply ingrained social and cultural demands on trans artists to produce autobiographical works with an impossible moral high-ground.

The exhibition at Index is in some ways a conceptual continuation of Nilsson’s recent host-assisted solo RESPAWN, presented at Inkonst, Malmö in February 2026. Of the similarities, the artist states that “both of the works sardonically undertake transsexual embodiment as an abomination and translate sexual biology as a potential site of supernatural horror”. The invitation to create a new work for Index necessitates a shift from performance and the context of the stage towards a dramatisation of the exhibition space – opening up possibilities for Nilsson to play with dramaturgy through a different set of spatial, visual, textual and temporal parameters. She invokes a dystopian premonition that weaves together inspiration from historical references including medieval witch trials, religious symbolism, mystical confessional literary modes and the strange convergence between the nano-languages of trans and looksmaxxing communities.

Ruby Nilsson (SE, b. 1993) is an artist and writer whose work explores how sexual difference is staged through aesthetics of enmity. Nilsson’s work spans performance, video installation, curation, and writing. Her projects unfold as extended series of intricate worldbuilding that together operate as closed systems of investigation, often expanding and evolving with each new installment.

Recent projects include the host-assisted solo RESPAWN, presented at Inkonst (Malmö), and the ongoing performance project and curatorial initiative Center of Unseen Trans Survival (C.U.T.S.) (2025), presented at My Wild Flag (Stockholm) and Warehouse9 (Copenhagen). Earlier works has also been shown at institutions and venues including Göteborgs Konsthall (Göteborg), Norbergfestival (Norberg), Turteatern (Stockholm), Skånes Konstförening (Malmö), Konsthall C (Stockholm), Rewild (Copenhagen) and Fylkingen (Stockholm).

Nilsson is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her writing has been published in journals including Bastard and Paletten Art Journal.