Body and Mind

The film starts with the familiar sounds of a washing machine in spin cycle. In a gloomy laundry room, someone is waiting for the spin cycle to end.

The room is bare, the large sign on the wall looming its instructions:

PLEASE

1. No smoking
2. No pets
3. No body and mind separation
4. Don’t climb on the equipment
5. Don’t tumble-dry your body
6. Clean up after yourself

THANK YOU!

The film Body and Mind by Hugo Karlsson and Marianne Schmidt depicts a dysfunctional cooperation between a physical and ever-changing, body and a constantly malleable mind. ‘Do not tumble-dry your body’ – ‘No body and mind separation’.

Does the person – the body and mind – heed the instructions on the wall?

Body and Mind is a humorous and thought-provoking film that in an illustrative way recalls norms and identity. It makes us reflect on what it means to have a body and a mind, and what it would mean to separate the two. Why would you tumble dry your body? Why would you separate the body from the mind? Do we always have a choice?

In the end of the film, the mind hangs the shrunken body on a rack – stretching it out to fit again.

The film is installed in collaboration with Inuti Foundation. Inuti works with artistically talented individuals with intellectual disabilities and individuals within the autism spectrum. During the spring of 2025, Art Initiative and Inuti foundation have partnered to host art workshops and install Body and Mind.

The workshops will be open on Thursday, May 8, and Monday, May 12, between 13-17, in the atrium behind the info-center. Do drop-in to create your own art-banner together with artists from Inuti ateljéer.

The artists Hugo Karlsson and Marianne Schmidt will also give a lunch Art talk on Friday May 9 2025.

Born in 1987, Hugo Karlsson has been an active artist at the Inuti Foundation in Stockholm since 2009. He works with a variety of media including film, sculpture, and writing, but his main focus lies in drawing—primarily in pencil or ink. His preferred subjects are characters and human figures, often depicted through a bizarre lens where both light and darkness coexist naturally.

Karlsson has a fascination for language and fantasy-worlds. He likes to find different ways to express and communicate his inner world and has a series of work he calls Stress Drawings – a way for him to process stress and anxiety: “I always begin with an eye. By letting the pen move freely to build an image, I allow thoughts and feelings to emerge.”

Hugo is a commissioned website- and book illustrator and regularly contributes comics to the magazine iMAGO. He has participated in exhibitions, festivals, and presented both in Sweden and internationally. In 2019, his short film You and Eye received an award at the Oska Bright Film Festival.

Marianne Schmidt (b. 1978) has been an active artist at the Inuti Foundation in Stockholm since 2015. Though Schmidt holds a master’s degree in architecture, she primarily works with sculpture, film, drawing, embroidery, and writing in her artistic practice. 

Schmidt has described her practice as a way to search for a coherence and connections that often elude her in her everyday life. To explore universal and societal structures through personal experience. As an adult she was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which gave yet another perspective on the world around her — and on her creative work.

Marianne has played a leading role in multiple projects, including Living Autism (2016) and Out by Art (2018), and has exhibited at events such as Open Art Örebro (2022), the Outsider Art Festival in Helsinki (2022), and the Oska Bright Film Festival in Brighton (2024). In 2024, she completed a public art commission for Botkyrka Municipality in Uttran: an interactive sculpture titled Om du vill vara med mig (If you want to be with me).