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Andreas Engman


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mail: andreas.engman@agitera.com
cell: +46(0)704155739

Studio / Public platform:
TEMPORARY STABILISATIONS
Harald Stakegatan 2, 415 15 GBG


I'm an artist, educator, and former chef living and working in Gothenburg. My artistic practice is rooted in a conceptual and research-driven methodology. A long-standing interest in my work is investigating the many productive entanglements formed in the intersection of institutional critique, political philosophy, politics of food, and performance practices. My works are associative, open-ended assemblages that often meet the public through installations, performances, and soundscapes. I frequently seek counter-rational strategies and speculative forms of meaning-making when producing work. I'm interested in how metaphor can open up speculative reframings and new interpretations of a specific subject. And how to practice methods of cross-pollination to try to see things in a new light by borrowing the specificities from one field of study to contaminate old customs in the crossover between subjects and new ways of knowing. My experience as a professional chef offers material knowledge and practical skills to my work on food and commensality.

Further investigations into the many political, aesthetic, and affective intersections of art and food are performed through the collaborative platform AFTERWORKS, which is run together with artists Rose Brander and Kjell Caminha.

Continuing my deep interest in the fabric of institutions through their structures, attitudes, and ecologies, I initiated the artist-run platform Temporary Stabilisations with artist Annie Johansson. Temporary Stabilisations can be seen as another vehicle and strategy to explore expanded practices tied to "the institutional." This project aims to establish a space to gain further insights into the complex ecologies of institutions. The space is a studio and a public transdisciplinary platform for contemporary art and related practices, situated in a former convenience store in Gamlestan in Gothenburg, Sweden.

In collaboration with Kjell Caminha, MC Coble, and Jeuno Kim, I also formed the group Public* Display* of Actions*. P*D*A* is an anti-fascist platform using performance and speech tactics from street and guerilla theater, agitprop, Speakers' Corners, and political assemblies to initiate contexts for collective experience, demonstration, and dialogue insisting on vigilance and direct process as a dramaturgical method and approach. How can the visual and performative literacy of art be shared and used collectively among artists, activists, researchers, and the general public to navigate the swiftly changing social and political climate in a time when white power and institutional violence are gathering in the wake of political instability driven by post-factual politics, white fragility, and entitlement?
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1 Index:
Selected Works
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Current & Upcoming:

* The Tincture, The Fluid, The Comestible, The Vapor:  Ritualizing the Omnivore's Paradox through the lens of the institution as body
* A Prelude: The Tincture, The Fluid, The Comestible, The Vapor
* The Omnivore’s Paradox: Critical Mouthfeel of Institutions
* Corpus Politicum: A Lively Vessel
* A Sour Place: Embodied Metabolisms and Fermented Narratives
* Recovery Drink!
* Undrar om hästar sjunger blues * Huvudgata, park, träd och sten:  
   En meditation över Västlänken och station Haga genom ljud, text, performance och objekt
 * Who Gets In? Rethinking Admissons – Confronting Segregation * Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Act 12: The Pentathlon
* Utgrävningar: Småland - Kansas och tillbaks igen
 * Temporary Stabilisations
* Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Act 11: The Musical
* Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Acts 7-10: The Mixtapes
* Dance Armstrong and the Log Sessions
* Eating Venice: Lagoon Legumes, Ceremony & Heritage
* Dicks Revisited
* Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Acts 4-6: Remix
* The Institute for Potentiality & Actualization: “Taxidermy of Speculative Gestures – a 21-day Conference”
* Let’s Mobilize! What is Feminist pedagogy?
* A Stockholm Syndrome * Assemblage: Dicks Revisited
* A Line Made by Swimming
* Between Symbolic Acts, Environmental Qualities & Human Sensibilities

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Current: 11-month residency @ Jan van Eyck, Post-Academy for Art, Design and Reflection, 15 January - 15 December 2026

Recently: 
The Tincture, The Fluid, The Comestible, The Vapor:
Ritualizing the omnivore’s paradox through the lens of the institution as body. Performative Dinner in collaboration with Marente van der Valk and the Jan van Eyck Food Lab. As part of Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings, curated by Bruno Alves de Almeida. May 28-29, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

The Omnivore’s Paradox:
Critical Mouthfeel of Institutions performance @ Skogen, 21 & 22 November 2025

The Tincture, The Fluid,
The Comestible, The Vapor

Ritualizing the Omnivore's Paradox through the lens of the institution as body
(2026)

Performance, Installation, Publication, Sound & Costume: Andreas Engman
Co-performer: Mei Lui / Food: Marente van der Valk  / Paint & Pigments: Dorieke Schreurs
Publication, Visual Identity, Graphic Design & Edible Prints: Punxh Peerasin Hutaphaet
Photography: Jan van Eyck Academie 
Curator: Bruno Alves de Almeida







“As he was escorted through vast halls (ventricles) and labyrinthine corridors (intestines) of the institution, he thought of what he had swallowed during the admissions interview. It scared him because he knew his life was at risk whenever he chose to ingest unknown matter, but so too was his place in the universe, his essence, his nature—in short, his entire identity, he thought. An object inadvisedly incorporated may contaminate him, insidiously transform him from within, possess him, or rather depossess him of himself.1 As they continued deeper inside, he began to hear drone-like sounds, distorted voices, and muffled chants; it sounded like a lament. Screaming voices in the distance heightened his anxiety; he couldn’t think straight. Were the sounds only in his head? Was he still acting of his own volition? A long walk deeper into the inner realms of the complex would eventually lead him to the chamber of rituals.”

1 Claude Fischler. ”Food, Self and Identity”. Social Science Information/sur les sciences sociales. (27. 275-292. 1988)


The Tincture, The Fluid, The Comestible, The Vapor draws heavily from the sci-fi–baroque short story written for the occasion. In this off-world myth and surreal political allegory about institutions as bodies and eating as ritual, we get to follow a bureaucrat-turned-insurgent who uses bizarre “gustatory rituals” to smuggle transformative matter into authoritarian systems, turning meals, smells, and digestion into acts of resistance. Set in a dystopian future governed by HypnoTech corporations and bureaucratic overreach, a clandestine Guild wages its quiet insurgency through acts of tasting, swallowing, inhaling, and anointing, as though ingestion itself were a form of revolution. Institutions are turned into living bodies, politics into a digestive system, and the self is treated as something unstable, always at risk of being transformed, contaminated, or unmade. Food is never merely food; it is threshold, threat, and metamorphosis. The result, a speculative theory disguised as a fever dream about food, power, and possession.

The work is presented as a performative 3-course gustatory ritual, in collaboration with Marente van der Valk and the Jan Van Eyck Food Lab, as part of the symposium Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings. The symposium was curated by Bruno Alves De Almeida and organized by the Jan van Eyck Academie, on May 28 and 29, 2026.  





 










































































 











































































































A Prelude:
The Tincture, The Fluid,
The Comestible, The Vapor

Text: Andreas Engman  
Visual Identity & Graphic Design: Punxh Peerasin Hutaphaet
Curator: Bruno Alves de Almeida
Printing: Jan van Eyck Academie, Printing & Publishing Lab



In this off-world myth and surreal political allegory about institutions as bodies and eating as ritual, we get to follow a bureaucrat-turned-insurgent who uses bizarre “gustatory rituals” to smuggle transformative matter into authoritarian systems, turning meals, smells, and digestion into acts of resistance. Set in a dystopian future governed by HypnoTech corporations and bureaucratic overreach, a clandestine Guild wages its quiet insurgency through acts of tasting, swallowing, inhaling, and anointing, as though ingestion itself were a form of revolution. Institutions are turned into living bodies, politics into a digestive system, and the self is treated as something unstable, always at risk of being transformed, contaminated, or unmade. Food is never merely food; it is threshold, threat, and metamorphosis. The result, a speculative theory disguised as a fever dream about food, power, and possession.

.  .  .

A short story written for the occasion of the symposium
Artistic Prefigurations, Institutional Becomings, curated by Bruno Alves De Almeida
and organized by the Jan van Eyck Academie, on 28th and 29th May, 2026.
The symposium is developed within the European Cooperation Project
Institution(ing)s: Co-Creating Inclusive and Sustainable European Art Institutions.




























































The Omnivore’s Paradox:
Critical Mouthfeel of Institutions

Performed at SKOGEN 2025












Duration: 3 hours
Performance, Installation, Costume & Sound: Andreas Engman
/ Light Design: Fabian Roos & Johan Almström / Photography: Hendrik Zeitler



The Omnivore’s Paradox: Critical Mouthfeel of Institutions, is a performative and metaphorical exploration of the paradoxical nature of eating. The work is presented as a three-hour ongoing performance installation where the audience can come and go as they please throughout the evening. 

”The omnivore is inclined towards diversification, innovation, exploration and change, which can be vital to its survival; but on the other hand it has to be careful, mistrustful, ”conservative” in its eating: any new, unknown food is a potential danger. The omnivore’s paradox lies in the tension, the oscillation between the two poles of neophobia (prudence, fear of the unknown, resistance to change) and neophilia (the tendency to explore, the need for change, novelty, variety). Every omnivore, and man in particular, is subject to a kind of Batesonian double bind between the familiar and the unknown, monotony and change, security and variety. There is perhaps a fundamental anxiety in man’s relationship to foods, resulting not only from the need to distrust new or unknown foods, but also and more importantly from the tension between the two contradictory and equally constraining imperatives of the omnivore’s paradox.”
Claude Fischler. ”Food, Self and Identity”. Social Science Information/sur les sciences sociales. (27. 275-292. 1988)

If we examine what it truly means to eat something, it is a profoundly radical act! We take an external object from the world and make it a part of ourselves. This act risks our entire existence. Items whose taste and mouthfeel can bring pleasure and well-being can also pose a threat to our lives, depending on what they are made of. These fundamental ideas about eating are presented in The Omnivore’s Paradox, in speculative relation to concepts such as liminal spaces, the Eucharist rite, the institution as a body, and anxiety-inducing threshold states. All of these concepts are interconnected in one way or another through the many paradoxical practices of eating.

You can listen to the sound work HERE!