DANIEL YOUSEFF

FROM INFERNO
23 FEBRUARY – 19 MARCH 2023

Welcome to Daniel Youssef’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is an introduction to an artistry that deals with questions concerning identity and language. The exhibition consists of a series of works from the artist’s ongoing project Inferno.

In 1897 August Strindberg published his partly self-biographic novel Inferno. Strindberg’s struggle existed on many levels, between dream and reality, sanity and paranoia, the occult and the tangible. He describes Paris and a social life where he befriends writers and artists, but where he also feels estranged and develops a fear of being persecuted and ridiculed.

The struggles of Daniel Youssef are also two-sided, they deal with the challenges of being in between two languages, two cultures and to a certain extent, in between two different views of the world. With the one foot he stands in his parents’ respective cultures, and with the other he stands firmly in Sweden, the land in which he was born. Youssef’s parents immigrated to Sweden in the 1970’s and the spoken language around him at home was Arabic. However, in the outside world, Swedish dominated. Youssef never became completely fluent in Arabic, neither did his Swedish sound exactly as that of his friends with Swedish-born parents. This resulted in a breach in terms of identity as well as in the experience of history and the understanding of a shared present. From within this breach, Youssef has found his creative language which has taken physical form in installations, drawings, neon works and film. He describes himself as “An Arab whose western culture, ironically enough, is a confirmation of his Arabic origin”. Youssef may very well find his inspiration in his private and personal experiences of life, but he succeeds ingeniously in transforming these experiences into a common understanding of identification and he, thus, offers a platform for a discussion about human possibilities and challenges in a border-crossing world.

Language as a pillar of culture is central to Youssef’s neon works which shed both light and shadow over the rapid digitalization of quick translations, where the obvious weakness lay in the loss of a deeper contextual understanding of the importance of culture in relation to different linguistic and national identities.

DANIEL YOUSSEF, born 1975 in Växjö, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. He has exhibited at Södertälje konsthall, Skövde konsthall, and Arsenalsgatan 3 in Stockholm, among others. He is represented at Skövde konsthall and Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, and is the former recipient of a working grant from The Mirror Institution, Sweden. Daniel Youssef is currently part of the group show “Swedish Ecstasy”, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, at Bozar in Brussels (17 February – 21 May 2023). In the exhibition he presents two new works in the company of works by August Strindberg, among others.