Konstepidemin’s Guest Artist och IASPIS grant recipient Cop Shiva presents his ongoing photo project “Spring is Warmer than the Sea” during Konstepidemin’s open house day June 3rd.

Spring is Warmer than the Sea
Spring in Sweden is coming to live in a very progressive way, in a slow motion blossoming process. Where I come from, in India, spring comes all of a sudden, like a burst of flowers overnight. Indeed the change of seasons and the life cycle of plants influence the lives of the people and how it’s interaction with the surroundings happens.

Parallel, the advanced approach of Sweden regarding refugees, and how the country has welcome people in distress from every corner of the world during the years, offering them a ray of hope in their lives, is a remarkable fact.

Is not by chance that the recent political events in north Africa and the Middle East was  called The Arab Spring. Refugees live in hope of Spring means a new live; spring brings an opportunity to come out of darkness to a new light.

An exile relationship with the city is a fragmented one, they expect to find a new life, and wondering when spring will come to their lives and distress will be over. There is a primal need to belong, but for them the notion of home only exists in their imagination, they struggle to find a land to claim as residence while struggling for survival.

In this work, I establish a dialogue between Spring in Sweden and the Spring in refugees life through a series of portraits of exiles of several nations, as Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia and Syria sheltered in Sweden, shot in selected locations where spring season is more obvious. For a moment, reality and dream coexists, because Spring is warmer than the Sea.
– Cop Shiva