Quick Facts
Biography
Arvida Byström is a Swedish artist born in 1991 near Stockholm, who is mainly known as a photographer and model but who also makes music. She is based in Los Angeles, London and Stockholm. She cooperates with many magazines and brands such as Nasty Gal, Monki, Wonderland Magazine, Lula Magazine, Vice, Rookie mag, Garage magazine, Baby Baby Baby magazine and I heart magazine.
Art and photography
Byström started taking pictures at age 12 with a digital camera, and she took a lot of selfies to “know the truth about how the world sees you”. Daughter of Internet, inspired in the beginning by Tumblr, she started posting pictures on her account and taking part in a community of female artists questioning feminity and gender standards, using a so-called “girly” aesthetic and “girly coded stuff”. Continuing to take selfies and discovering feminism, Byström also took pictures about period-related things in the series There Will Be Blood, published in Vice, on 17 May 2012. She also assumed and valorized female body hair.
After growing up in Stockholm and still living with her parents, Byström moved to London to become more independent. She made her first fashion series for Monki and created her own gallery space, GAL, with photographer and friend Hanna Antonsson. Through GAL they curated emerging artists for one night shows. In spite of this, Byström still positioned herself as being more a part of popular culture than the art world.
As a member of the female collective The Ardorous, Byström presented some of her photographs in Babe – a book published on 1 May 2015, including works of 30 other female artists, curated by Petra Collins.
The same year, Byström took part in the exhibition Girls At Night On The Internet, curated by Grace Miceli, together with artists such as Petra Collins, Molly Soda and Maggie Dunlap. The show dealt with the misrepresentation of young artists such as themselves in the art world, and it showcased their work IRL.
Taking part in creating an online culture that aims at reinventing body norms and which is all about self-empowerment, Byström also created a performance with the artist Maja Malou Lyse, which was called Selfie Stick Aerobics. It is a tutorial that shows how to take better selfies and which aims at making participants feel beautiful by accepting their bodies as they are. On 4 October 2015, Byström and Lyse published a video about this performance on YouTube.
Being a star of Instagram, Byström explores self-identity as a queer woman and questions sexualized women’s bodies. She decided to put together a book with the artist Molly Soda about Instagram censorship, called Pics or It Didn’t Happen: Images Banned From Instagram. The book was released on 6 March 2017 and it showcases mostly pictures of women’s bodies that Instagram has taken down.