The Mystery of Life, Revisited

Swedish artist Gustaf Broms about his life and work

Swedish artist Gustaf Broms has, since the early 1990s, developed a symbolic language in order to help him understand his own being. On an adventurous journey stretching over photography, filmmaking, sculpting, collaging, music making and on to performance art, his artworks and the process become pieces of a puzzle that constitute not only the human being called Gustaf Broms but also human life itself in general. The grand scale of Broms’ ambitions signals a willingness to share his highly experimental attitude and its findings with other people. Thus his persona as an artist grows into something more ambitious, yet at the same time more undefined. The multifaceted expressions of his work seem to contain the very same theme, the very same question: where exactly lies “self” in the human being? Who exactly are we and which tools do we need to find out? For Broms himself, the initial tool was photography.

– I think that picking up the camera was a few years before I went to China and Tibet in 1986. I’m on the same path today but use different tools. But that is when it became this drive. I was learning something about making images and then, going to Asia, was when it became like a having a key. It was a tool for approaching people and situations that I felt that I couldn’t access or didn’t dare access. But when I had it I felt like I had some tool for exploring the world.