Opening 10 September, Ruby Nilsson’s exhibition Recantation transforms Index into a theatrical setting for her new video installation of the same name.

The exhibition at Index is in many ways a conceptual continuation of Ruby Nilsson’s recent solo RESPAWN, (presented at Inkonst, Malmö, in February 2026) and her ongoing work with dark poetics of trans misogyny. The shift from performance and the context of the stage towards a dramatisation of the exhibition space opens up possibilities for Nilsson to play with dramaturgy through a different set of spatial, textual and temporal parameters.

Ruby Nilsson (SE, b. 1993) is an artist and writer. Through her work, Nilsson investigates the processes through which sex is enforced as a necessary element of state power and social life, predominantly tracing these processes via the dark histories and genealogies of trans and queer bodies in a European context. Her work spans performance, installation, curation, and writing, where projects unfold as series of intricate world-builds, together operating as closed systems of investigation. Consistently mixing elements from theatre and performance with more conventional exhibition formats, her works often install themselves as grey zones between the black box and the white cube.

Influenced by her training in philosophy, her work is marked by a deep interest in text, voice, and orality, especially the complex language models and vernacular worlds that trans and queer people create as forms of survival and community-making. Inspired by and entwined in these nano-cultures of trans and queer languages, her work often amplifies the visceral, morbid, and witty styles and tonalities that these worlds produce as tools of endurance.

Other works and performances by Ruby Nilsson have been presented at institutions and venues such as Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA, Gothenburg), Black Box Teater (Oslo), Skånes Konstförening (Malmö), Basement (Copenhagen), Warehouse9 (Copenhagen), Fylkingen (Stockholm), Turteatern (Stockholm), My Wild Flag (Stockholm), Norbergfestival (Norberg) and more. Besides her artistic work, she has also taught various workshops in creative writing, such as the summer course “Text as an Artistic Medium”(2024-2025) hosted as a collaboration between Index and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her writing has been published in journals such as Bastard and Paletten Art Journal.

Ruby Nilsson was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Read more about RESPAWN and other works here.