Bruce Karim · Artistic research
What do we carry?
Who gets to belong?
My research begins with things I have lived, materials I notice and questions that stay with me. I work through painting, mixed media, movement and performance, allowing the body and the material to lead me somewhere I could not reach through words alone.
These are developing projects and lines of inquiry: places where I test a form, listen, make, return and begin again.
Still Arriving · A developing body of work
Belonging is lived.
Recognition is something else.
I am Ugandan-Swedish. When I return to Uganda, I am seen as a foreigner. In Sweden, I experience that same distance. I belong to both places, yet I feel like an outsider in both.
Still Arriving grows from this experience. Becoming Swedish has not removed my Ugandan identity. But a document, a border or someone else’s assumptions can change how I am received.
In Uganda, I have been directed to the tourist line and spoken to as if I did not know the language. I know the place and the language, yet I am read as someone arriving from outside. That distance is familiar to me in Sweden too.
I want to make work from the space between knowing who I am and having that belonging recognised by others.
Documents, bodies and the act of arriving.
A document can make one identity official while leaving another part of your experience unseen. I am interested in what happens when a person is read through a passport, a name, an appearance or an accent—and in everything those readings leave out.
Through painting and mixed media, I am developing a visual language for these questions. The main body of paintings for Still Arriving is still to be made. Documents are an emerging thread within the work, alongside memory, perception and the experience of moving between places.
Questions I return to
Who decides when someone belongs? What changes when the document changes? How can the body hold a connection that other people do not recognise?
How I work
I bring lived experience into material experiments, painted surfaces, gesture and reflection. I look for forms that can hold uncertainty without reducing a person to a single explanation.
Research direction · Uganda
Returning, listening, exchanging.
Uganda is part of my life and my artistic practice. Some materials I use in my work have come from earlier journeys there. A future research visit would extend that connection through professional artistic exchange and exploration of sound, movement and materials.
Alongside exchanges with artists and organisations, I want to make space for community encounters and shared creative activity. These relationships can bring other perspectives into the research while allowing me to contribute through my own practice.
This is a proposed research direction, rather than a completed trip or a confirmed exhibition.
RISE UP · Performance research
From being looked at
to being heard.
RISE UP brings live painting, dance and movement, sound, silence and installation into the same space. It asks what it means to carry experiences that others cannot see, and to claim a place for your own voice and presence.
I work with breath, a covered mouth, stillness, falling and rising, cardboard structures and the act of painting in public. Black representation is part of this inquiry: how a body is seen, what is projected onto it and what that person chooses to express.
The first public presentation took place at Konsthall C in 2025, followed by Amnesty Artivism in 2026. I am developing these experiences into an expanded performance, testing choreography, sound and how bodies and paintings inhabit a shared space.
An active audience
When does looking at an artwork become meeting the person behind it? How does the presence of an audience affect the painting, the movement and the atmosphere?
A shared process
I want collaborators to shape the work through their own bodies, movements and encounters with the paintings. I am interested in how a collective can form without everyone moving in the same way.
Material studies · Emerging ideas
What has been discarded
can still hold a presence.
Creative reuse is part of my visual language. Packaging, textiles and everyday objects arrive with shapes, marks and previous uses. I work with those traces as part of what the image or object can become.
Two faces, one suspended form
Working concept
I am developing an idea for a hanging sculpture made with reused cans: two Black faces, visible from opposite sides, with the supporting core concealed. The work would remain suspended while being made and when exhibited.
I want to explore how two presences can share one structure, and how a viewer’s position changes what they can see.
Found arrangements
Research direction
In 2024, I began noticing discarded materials—including cigarette ends in a corner near my garage—as compositions. Something left on the ground could hold a rhythm, a balance or an unexpected image.
I am considering how photography, collected material, installation and painting could respond to these arrangements: recording what I find, then reconstructing or transforming it.
Developing the work together.
I welcome conversations about residencies, artistic exchanges, research spaces and development partnerships. I am interested in working with artists, curators, cultural organisations and others who want to engage with these questions through making.
