THE INSTITUTE FORUM · FEATURED MEMBERS
Cecilia Germain
Visual Artist · Research-Led Practice
Working with memory, bodies, plants and the histories that dominant accounts leave out.
Biography
Cecilia Germain is a Swedish-Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Uppsala. A graduate of Konstfack, her practice encompasses photography, drawing, watercolour, performance, installation and olfactory or botanical materials. She investigates the relationships between histories of colonialism, public health, identity, grief and the possibilities of repair.
Philosophy & approach
Germain’s practice treats artistic form as a means of approaching forms of knowledge that are not always visible in conventional archives. Plants, scents, bodily experience, material traces and speculative narration can carry memories across geographies and generations. Her work is attentive to whose histories are authorised and whose may require other means of telling.
Selected work & current practice
Her work A Mermaid’s Tears Are Always Blue appeared in the 2021 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, where the sea is approached as an archive of displacement, violence and hope. Other work has explored embodied power relations through Carrying White Men and interdisciplinary initiatives connecting care, botany and historical inquiry. Public exhibitions and research events have situated her work across art, social histories and knowledge production.