7.6.2025 – 17.8.2025 

This summer, Sinne has the privilege of showing works by the Swedish artist Tobias Bradford, who has attracted increasing attention in recent years for his animated, mixed-media sculptures depicting deconstructed human figures, body parts and limbs.

In his new exhibition, Health and Safety, Bradford addresses ideas about the complex relationship between the individual and society. The title is inspired by workplace safety regulations and user manuals for operating various types of tools and equipment. The content of these texts can often appear obvious, and even comical. But the over-detailed information is perhaps not there to protect the reader and the user, but to serve as a legally watertight document that covers whoever is behind the words. This offers us a broader perspective on the title and the exhibition: examining caring and what connects us as human beings.

At Sinne, Bradford makes use of the entire space, creating a site-specific installation. He continues his study of the human body and, above all, of the unspoken language of bodily gestures. It could be said that, by isolating compulsive movements and tics, he works with the body that occupies itself with doing something while not doing anything. In his rudimentary mechanical automata, he focuses on generating small, repetitive movements, tremors, and tension in limbs, joints, and tendons. By operating with this uncontrolled bodily activity, Bradford also shows us what is outside the picture – the living environment that surrounds us, its culture powerfully imbued with demands for better results, constant optimization, and dreams of a steadily expanding market economy. He captures the friction between an internal and an external pressure, in which our sense of the individual’s incapacity and dysfunction becomes tangible. In observing and affirming this maladaptive, non-productive behaviour in a single person, he sheds light on something extremely human and lyrically beautiful.

We cannot unsee that Bradford’s art is situated in the so called “uncanny valley” phenomenon, and also has many parallels with body horror. But there is also warmth and a sense of humour at its core. His treatment and staging of his material is primitive and raw. The mechanisms are controlled by humming machines, taut wires and ropes that run over pulleys, setting their levers, and finally their outermost parts, in motion. He also occasionally employs musical instruments, such as accordions and drums, which bring an urgently discordant tone into the exhibition space. In his art, Bradford mixes Swedish folksiness and safety with a sense of urgency. The outcome of his creative playfulness is an imperfect, but functioning construction – one that deploys the means of the puppeteer to create a world that evokes wonder in the viewer. The animated manikins in Bradford’s holistic machinery remind me and you that we are all related to each other, that the separate individual is not only governed by their own consciousness, but also by everything that happens beneath the surface, and between us. He captures the pulse of an extremely palpable nervousness that lives on in the shadow of our time, when acceleration, progress and information have become hard currency.

Markus Åström
Curator

Tobias Bradford

Tobias Bradford (b. 1993 Örebro, Sweden) lives and works in London. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019, after which he pursued Master’s studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Bradford took preparatory art studies at Örebro Art School in 2014–16. Solo exhibitions: Hundis, Trollhättan’s Art Gallery, Trollhättan, 2025; As my eyes adjust, Company Gallery, NYC 2024; Cold air on tender skin, Örebro Konsthall, Örebro 2024; Big hole, Saskia Neuman Gallery, Stockholm 2022; Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant Exhibition, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm 2021; and STAGE FRIGHT, Huxley-Parlour, London, 2021. Selected collective exhibitions: Here we are now, Sven Harrys Konstmuseum, Stockholm, 2025; Otherworldly, Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala, 2024; Weird Sensation Feels Good: The world of ASMR, London Design Museum, London, 2022; Ghost in the machine, Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg, 2022; and Survival of the fittest, Accelerator, Stockholm, 2020. Bradford was awarded the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant to Young Artists in 2021. He is represented by Saskia Neuman Gallery, Stockholm and Company Gallery, NYC. His art is in the following collections; Bonnier, Ståhl, Magasin 3, Västerås Art Museum, Colección SOLO, and Lab’Bel.

tobiasbradford.com