Strindberg comes apart.

Nordiska museet
Art direction & design

At Nordiska museet, artist Daniel Youssef reads August Strindberg's Inferno through scrambled words, hand sketches and neon — a surreal interpretation, shown alongside Strindberg's own painting The Wave.

The scrambling is deliberate. Youssef runs text through Google Translate between Swedish, English and Arabic until the words come back as a labyrinth — a way of examining what it means to live inside and between languages. The exhibition pairs his neon portrait of Strindberg with THE WAVE VIII from 1901–1902.

Youssef's material was deliberately unruly: text, hand sketches, neon, a painting from 1901. Our part was to give it structure without tidying it up — a solid frame that holds the chaos rather than resolving it. In the catalogue that meant setting Strindberg's original passages against Youssef's translated ones, page by page, and letting the reader watch the language come apart.

Curated by Vanessa Gandy. Foreword by Dan Wolgers, essay by Mustafa Can, texts on Strindberg and Hazelius by Cecilia Hammarlund. Original photograph by August Strindberg from the collections of Strindbergsmuseet.