Curators’ words

Art and design education is not just about personal skill or expression – it helps grow the visionaries society needs. Here, art teachers prepare to nurture creativity for the next generation. Designers as well as craft and fine artists learn to shape not only their works but also how we might see, feel, and live together in the future. This is where new aesthetic movements begin to develop.

It has been a pleasure meeting the students and hearing their ideas and intentions for the 2025 Degree Exhibition. Each meeting provided insight into thoughtful and imaginative projects shaped by personal commitment and deep engagement with the world around them.

Amid ecological collapse, increasing authoritarianism, and a fragmented sense of reality, these graduating students have decided to work with care, strength, and purpose. They explore through imagination, skilled hands, and an aesthetic honed through years of attentive work.

Across disciplines and practices, their degree projects explore the complexities of an unstable world while envisioning alternative ways to inhabit it. Some create spaces for gathering, dreaming, or grieving, while others transform waste into acts of care, reclaim ancestral memories, or attentively address the experiences of the mind and body in pain. Many navigate the tension between past and future, balancing the urgency of the present with the slower rhythms of making, growth, and healing.

This exhibition is not a singular statement but a constellation of voices. The students explore through speculative fiction, educational tools, textile rituals, AI-driven processes, and mythologies. From fire to fungus, intimacy to ideology, everything becomes a site of inquiry and making, listening, remembering, and asking: What should we preserve? What needs to change? And where do we meet and connect in this moment?
They graduate at a time when old systems are breaking down and when the language of certainty no longer holds. And yet, in these uncertain times, they offer belonging, resistance, and radical hope.

Abir Boukhari and Ulrika Flink
Curators of Konstfack’s Degree Exhibition 2025