Ruby Nilsson: RECANTATION

Ruby Nilsson’s exhibition RECANTATION transforms Index into a ritualistic setting for Ruby Nilsson’s new video work of the same name. Nilsson confronts visitors through a grim economic science fiction, a worldbuild that explores a compromised and uncomfortable future of transsexual labor. Here, the artist follows the dark poetics of trans misogyny and unleashes it in all its unsettling and amoral glory; a move that can be read as a critique of what she regards as deeply ingrained social and cultural demands on trans artists to produce autobiographical works with an impossible moral high-ground.

The exhibition at Index is in some ways a conceptual continuation of Nilsson’s recent host-assisted solo RESPAWN, presented at Inkonst, Malmö in February 2026. Of the similarities, the artist states that “both of the works cynically undertake transsexual embodiment as an abomination and use trans medicine as a potential site of supernatural horror”. The invitation to create a new work for Index necessitates a shift from performance and the context of the stage towards a dramatisation of the exhibition space – opening up possibilities for Nilsson to play with dramaturgy through a different set of spatial, visual, textual and temporal parameters. The work weaves together inspiration from historical references including medieval witch trials, religious symbolism, mysticism, christian confessional literature and the strange convergence between the social cultures of trans and looksmaxxing communities.

The artist clarifies: “The work explores growing divides between identitarian alliances and how ‘new’ compromised forms of labor might be offered to future transsexuals in times of trans extinction. It also proposes potential forms of political and spiritual organization that, in their absurdity, push the current cultural imagination of trans existence. With the ongoing rise of progressive endocrinology alongside the systemic lack of scientific data on transsexual biology, the work speculates on a possible ‘revived’ interest in trans medicine as a zone of experimentation with molecular enhancement and gender optimization.”

RECANTATION is an installation centered around a video structured as a prologue, three consecutive chapters and an epilogue that follows the life and transmogrification of P-2026-007, a “passoid” resident/employee of New Endocrinological Order (NEO). Writing in blood on salvaged materials, P-2026-007 records a series of “confessions” that move between autobiography, political polemic, and mystical visions. As the narrative unfolds, an impossible scientific discovery transforms her into a foundational figure within The Recantationist’s belief system.

Ruby Nilsson (SE, b. 1993) is an artist and writer whose work explores how sexual difference is staged through aesthetics of enmity. Nilsson’s work spans performance, video installation, curation, and writing. Her projects unfold as extended series of intricate worldbuilding that together operate as closed systems of investigation, often expanding and evolving with each new installment.

Recent projects include the host-assisted solo RESPAWN, presented at Inkonst (Malmö), and the ongoing performance project and curatorial initiative Center of Unseen Trans Survival (C.U.T.S.) (2025), presented at My Wild Flag (Stockholm) and Warehouse9 (Copenhagen). Earlier works has also been shown at institutions and venues including Göteborgs Konsthall (Göteborg), Norbergfestival (Norberg), Turteatern (Stockholm), Skånes Konstförening (Malmö), Konsthall C (Stockholm), Rewild (Copenhagen) and Fylkingen (Stockholm).

Nilsson is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her writing has been published in journals including Bastard and Paletten Art Journal.

Alongside her artistic practice, Ruby Nilsson has written several essays that have been published in Paletten Art Journal and bastard, as well as several pamphlets created in conjunction with exhibitions at venues such as Norbergfestival, My Wild Flag and more. Her writing consciously plays with different formats like autotheory, fictocriticism and investigative journalism. Two of her texts are currently available online on bastards website. You can find them here and here.