27/08/2026
Opening Thursday 10 September, Ruby Nilsson’s solo exhibition RECANTATION transforms Index into a ritualistic setting for the artist’s new video work of the same name.
Ruby Nilsson confronts visitors through a grim economic science fiction, a worldbuild that explores a compromised and uncomfortable future of tr*******al 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 sardonically undertake tr*******al embodiment as an abomination and translate sexual biology 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.
She invokes a dystopian premonition that weaves together inspiration from historical references including medieval witch trials, religious symbolism, mystical confessional literary modes and the strange convergence between the nano-languages of trans and looksmaxxing communities.
Image: Still from Ruby Nilsson, Recantation, 2026.
Written and directed by Ruby Nilsson;
Animation: Jacob Habinc
Ruby Nilsson
