Carl-Mikael Björk

Curious photography and queer inquiries.
Sweden °1973
research interests: performativity, queerness, narratives, posthumanism, post-qualitative inquiry, PHOTOGRAPHY, Early childhood education
affiliation: Malmö University
en

I’m a photographer and artistic researcher exploring the overlapping terrain between aesthetic expression and academic inquiry. My practice diffracts through feminist philosophy, queer theory, and new materialism—drawing on thinkers such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler. I return, again and again, to questions of performativity, identity, and the epistemological role of photography. Through diffractive methodologies and situated encounters, I consider the photographic image not primarily as representation, but as an artefact that acts, affects, and thinks with us.


Master of Arts in Photography, Falmouth University

60 credits in Drama Pedagogy (undergraduate level), Lund University
Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood Education), Lund University

research

research expositions

  • Hyper - Diffractive Photographic Diptychs in the Queer Borderlands of Drag and Wrestling (2025) author(s): Carl-Mikael Björk published in: Research Catalogue
    An RC adaptation of the project as presented at the Hugarflug conference, Reykjavik 2025. The presentation takes its point of departure in a photographic artistic research project that moves within the queer borderlands between drag and wrestling – two performative expressions that, through eccentric personas, embodied gestures, and DIY culture, destabilise notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. I approach these practices as arenas of performativity, where the hypermasculine and the hyperfeminine are not positioned in opposition, but meet in mutual tension and unstable, embodied renegotiation. Through photography, in reciprocal movement with essayistic writing, I explore images of identity in motion. The presentation is part of a diffractive methodology, where photographs neither illustrate nor represent, but emerge as entangled with fiction, memory, theory, and philosophy as components of a broader research apparatus. An unstable interplay emerges, where photography and language generate tacit knowledge – a possible, partial and situated enactment of how identity and the body are (re)presented and displaced. The project is diffractively grounded in the thinking of Barad, Butler, and Haraway on research apparatuses, performativity, and situated knowledge – with particular attention to the camera’s and photographer’s access to spaces where identity is performatively negotiated.
     open exposition comments (0)