From Finance to the Body: Twenty Years of Goldin+Senneby

How do pine resin, antique paintings, robots, and farmland photographs reveal ownership’s power over life?

In the first hall of the Gwangju Biennale, nearly two tons of resin spread across the floor in a wide, shallow, amber-colored pool. It carries a honey-like sheen that makes approaching visitors stop, work out what they are looking at, then walk around its edge. The piece is called Resin Pond. Before anyone reads the wall text, it has already made them change their route.

A much smaller antique painting hangs on a nearby column. It shows a woman who appears to be praying, or caught somewhere close to religious ecstasy, a skull faintly visible beside her. The old frame and the cracks in the paint layer make it look like an ordinary work of religious art. Only on the back does a small patch of pale fungal growth appear, its edges stained where moisture has spread. The artists deliberately inoculated the canvas with a parasitic fungus, turning a painting that would normally need careful conservation into something that now sustains another form of life.

The piece is titled Swallowimage. Like the resin on the floor, it comes from the Swedish artist duo Goldin+Senneby.

The same first hall also holds their Lego robots, built to shake phones and fake step counts. The small machines are scattered across four of the biennale's five halls, so visitors keep meeting them again as they move through the show. A further hall holds a set of farmland inspection photographs the artists selected, taken by Swedish government officials.

Resin, an antique painting, robots, and administrative photographs are not an obvious set. But read across the four works, and one question keeps returning: how does a system decide whether a body is healthy or a piece of land qualifies, and how do those judgments go on to change how people and other forms of life get to live.

I. Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby

Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby have worked together since 2004 under the shared name Goldin+Senneby. Early in their collaboration, they launched The Port inside the virtual world Second Life, inviting participants to produce a magazine together and asking how much autonomy a person still has inside a digital space that has already been commercialized. In 2005, the project was presented through the Whitney Museum's online program Artport.

In the work that followed, they kept returning to a similar method: step into a system that is already running, borrow its own tools, and test its rules. Legal documents for offshore companies, the investment mechanisms of financial markets, and the contracts inside employment relationships have all become working material for them. They bring in writers, economists, and other professionals to let an inquiry grow into a novel, an exhibition, even a proposal that could create a real job.

In recent years, their attention has shifted toward illness, treatment, and care. What they investigate has changed, but the method carries over: work out how a mechanism operates, then see what it demands of the people living inside it. The four works in Gwangju give that shift something concrete to point to.

II. The Fungus Behind the Painting

The fungus on the back of Swallowimage is called Isaria sinclairii, and it is tied to the development of a multiple sclerosis drug. Researchers took a compound the fungus produces as their starting point, modified it chemically, and arrived at a treatment. That unremarkable patch of growth on the back of an old painting turns out to connect to a history that runs from biological research, through drug development, to commercial production.

The title comes from the German Schluckbildchen, small religious images meant to be swallowed. People once believed that taking a holy image into the body could offer protection or cure, so the image itself once functioned something like a drug. Now a fungus tied to drug development has entered the image instead, and the old painting has become its host.

But a fungus that might help a patient can just as easily damage the canvas in front of it. Its potential to heal and its capacity to corrode exist at the same time, only aimed at different things. The patch a visitor sees is tied to a treatment, and it is also the mark of a painting that is actively changing.

That puts a specific problem in front of a museum. Once an antique painting enters a collection, it normally needs controlled humidity and protection from mold, anything to slow the decay of its materials. Swallowimage does the opposite, deliberately introducing a fungus and making growth and erosion part of the work. Does conserving this piece mean protecting the original painting, or allowing the life just inoculated into it to keep changing it?

Drug development adds another layer to that relationship. What a fungus produces has to be extracted, studied, and modified before it can enter production and trade, and a patent helps decide who gets to use the result and who profits from it. The patch on the old painting cannot explain the whole industry on its own, but it gives a visitor a concrete place to start: how does the healing value carried by a form of life get discovered, converted, and put to use?

III. A Pine Tree's Defense, a Man's Disease

Resin Pond puts a similar question onto a pine tree.

When a pine tree is wounded, or attacked by fungus or insects, it secretes resin to seal the wound and fend off the attack. In the gallery, that protective substance has been spread out on a massive scale, becoming an obstacle visitors have to walk around. It draws people toward it even as it limits where they can go.

The piece connects to Senneby's own experience of multiple sclerosis. Both artists' recent work returns repeatedly to autoimmunity, to a mechanism built to protect the body that can end up damaging it instead. The MIT List Visual Arts Center has read the sheer scale of Resin Pond as an excessive immune response. When a protective substance accumulates on this scale, whether protection itself becomes a burden turns into a question a visitor's own body can feel.

A related piece, Crying Pine, pushes the connection between a tree's defenses and resource extraction further. It involves a pine tree genetically engineered to increase resin production for use as renewable fuel. The secretion a tree uses to protect itself has also become a resource that energy development wants to see produced in greater volume.

The two needs do not necessarily line up. How much resin a tree needs to stay alive is a different question from how much a developer wants to extract from it. Once a production target starts to determine a tree's own physiology, whether the tree can withstand that change becomes a question that matters a great deal.

Placed back inside that research, the resin on the gallery floor gets a more specific origin. Understanding the relationship between immunity and resource extraction still takes background information, but the work lets a visitor stop and walk around first, and only then ask why this substance is here. A bodily reaction becomes the first step into the inquiry.

IV. Machines That Report for the Body

The Lego robots turn a demand placed on the body into a task that gets carried out on a loop.

Ten small machines, each gripping a phone, shake continuously so that a step-counting app reads the mechanical motion as a person's steps. As long as the number on the phone keeps climbing, the machine has done its job. The piece is called Lego Pedometer Cheating Machines, and the build itself comes from instructions patients have shared online.

The devices target arrangements that tie activity data to insurance discounts. A policyholder has to supply a step count proving they have met a set exercise target, and the robots generate that record in the body's place. In the 2019 exhibition Insurgency of Life, they already appeared alongside the fungus, putting treatment and the collection of health data inside the same space.

What makes the machines absurd is how completely they satisfy the terms of the audit. The phone receives a movement signal, the app tallies the steps, and the record the system needs comes into being. None of it explains why the actual body did not walk, or whether it is dealing with fatigue, pain, or difficulty moving. The record clears the check while the body's actual condition stays unknown.

That interest in the distance between a rule and the life it is meant to describe was already present in Goldin+Senneby's earlier financial work.

Headless centers on an offshore company registered in the Bahamas. The artists brought in a writer, economists, and others, turning the inquiry into a detective narrative. The company, its location, and its legal relationships were all grounded in reality, but readers can only reach any of it through the accounts and investigations of different characters. The artists themselves spoke through proxies, so that a viewer's search for the work's author echoes the search for the company's actual owner.

Eternal Employment proposed a permanent position at a Gothenburg train station, its wages paid from investment returns. Whoever held the job would need to clock in, and what they did with their time was left up to them and became the content of the work. The proposal won a public art competition in 2017 and was later cancelled in 2022 over problems with the financing arrangement.

Read alongside the Lego robots, both works turn out to be concerned with how an institution confirms a person's status: a clock-in proves someone is at work, a step count proves someone is exercising. A record makes something auditable, but it cannot fully account for the labor involved or the state of the body behind it. Goldin+Senneby keep the form of these proofs and change the actual behavior underneath them, pushing a viewer to reconsider the relationship between a record and the reality it is supposed to stand for.

V. The Standard for a Landscape

Not Approved brings the same question onto the land.

The 2011 piece consists of 32 photographs, taken by Swedish government officials carrying out agricultural subsidy inspections. They record land judged not to meet landscape management requirements. The photographs began as an administrative procedure: an inspector left behind an image to support a decision on subsidy eligibility.

In the gallery, they still look like ordinary working photographs. A visitor sees grass, trees, ground that is not quite tidy, with little way to tell from the image alone why any of it failed to qualify. That judgment comes from outside the frame, from a standard that has to be looked up and interpreted.

The standard changes the land in turn. To meet the conditions for a subsidy, a landholder adjusts how it is managed, and the landscape shifts accordingly. The work's own text sums up this shift as a move from food producer to provider of a pastoral view. The subsidy system ends up deciding which plants get to stay, how land should be maintained, and what kind of scenery is worth supporting.

Its connection to the Lego robots shows up here too. A body has to submit a step count that meets requirements; a piece of land has to present a landscape that meets requirements. Photographs and phone data both do the work of recording, and both shape how resources get distributed, pushing whatever gets recorded to change its behavior, or its land.

This older piece gives Goldin+Senneby's recent research into illness and the body a longer stretch of time to sit inside. From offshore companies and employment schemes to agricultural subsidies, they have consistently tracked how institutions produce concrete consequences for a life through ownership, contracts, and inspection standards. Illness has made that inquiry more personal: what gets assessed and adjusted has gradually become their own bodies, and the treatment and care that a life now depends on.

What runs through these works is a sustained question about the relationship between a rule and the conditions of a life lived under it. What does a person, or any other form of life, have to change about themselves in order to receive resources, protection, and care? Once an institution has already decided what counts as qualified, healthy, or valuable, how much room does anyone living inside that definition still get to keep for their own life?

Goldin+Senneby, Resin Pond, 2025. Installation view, Gwangju Biennale, 2026. Photo: Ben Davis. Image source: Artnet News.

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