Andreas Engman
x
mail: andreas.engman@agitera.com
cell: +46(0)704155739
Studio / Public platform: Harald Stakegatan 2, 415 15 GBG
Artist and former chef Andreas Engman practices institutional critique at the intersection of performance, political philosophy, and the politics of food. His works are associative, open-ended assemblages that meet the public in installations, performances, and soundscapes. He is interested in how metaphor can speculatively reframe a subject and open new ways of interpreting it. Through processes of cross-pollination, he intermingles distinct fields of study to disrupt conventions and generate new ways of knowing across disciplines.
Engman’s recent work approaches institutions as bodies that “feed” through their various “admission” procedures (eating habits). When deciding which unknown elements to incorporate into the self, one might suggest that human bodies and institutions share the same contradictory feelings of neophobia (fear of the unknown) and neophilia (the need for change). The ingestion of unfamiliar elements can transform a body or institution from within, possessing or depossessing it of itself. As a body, the institution must therefore decide whether the unknown should be admitted and absorbed, or rejected and expelled.
Continuing his deep interest in the fabric of institutions—their structures, attitudes, and ecologies—he initiated the artist-run platform Temporary Stabilisations with artist Annie Johansson. Temporary Stabilisations can be seen as another vehicle and strategy for exploring expanded practices tied to ”the institutional.” The project aims to establish a space for gaining further insights into the complex ecologies of institutions. Located in a former convenience store in Gamlestan, Gothenburg, Sweden, the space serves as a studio and a public, transdisciplinary platform for contemporary art and related practices.︎
Selected Works
(scroll page or click in menue for specific works)
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
~
Upcoming:
The work, DEPOSSESSION OF THE SELF (Ritual, Institution, Matter), will be shown at the Open Studios at Jan van Eyck Academie, 23-25th October, Maastricht
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.
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
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
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 published 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.
. . .
A short story published 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 2025Duration: 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!
