Loving Sideways - Elin Svanelind

Within the complexity of lived experience — lesbian relationships, complex emotions, the female body, queerness, and society — I try to say something about the present. The line between intimate personal reflection and broader social or global commentary dissolves.

What does it mean to express emotions such as aggression, pleasure, and sexual desire — feelings women are often discouraged from exploring or even acknowledging. What draws me to the body is both its limits and its possibilities. The body becomes a way to challenge what is considered acceptable, to question fixed ideas about gender, norms, and sexuality.

Through the uncontrollable body, I seek to expand our understanding of gender and to offer women, queer, transgender, and non-binary people a sense that their bodies are powerful and limitless. I see powerful queer female bodies that unapologetically take up space. There is something liberating in bodies that refuse to conform to cultural expectations of speech, behavior, and gendered attributes. Their refusal becomes a kind of glitch — a failure to perform according to binary expectations — and I see this glitch as a form of resistance that reveals truths about our bodies.