Erotics as resistance: the work of Conny Karlsson Lundgren

In the 1920s and 30s, a criminal investigation followed by a trial against a group of allegedly homosexual men was launched in Gothenburg, Sweden. Almost a century later, Swedish artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren engages with these events in a multifaceted two-part installation and performative work that borrows the title from the investigation, The Gothenburg Affair (Göteborgsaffären). In this article, we describe how the investigation was conducted during a time in which the science of criminology expanded to envelop new technologies and methods of identification and categorization. Tools such as new uses of photography, the portrait parlé, and Kretschmerian body types were implemented to identify criminal individuals and behaviors and place them within a particular category of criminality or pathology. In his works, Karlsson Lundgren conspicuously brings out sensual and sexual details of the archival material and inverts the denigrating and stigmatizing ways in which these details were used in the source material. In the article, we describe the strategies though which Karlsson Lundgren’s work transforms aspects of the archival material and in this way intervenes in history to continue a resistance found between the lines of the archival material itself.