Born 1979, lives in Stockholm
Linda Shamma Östrand, born as Linda Shamma in Enånger 1979, started working within film in 1995. After being active within a number of different fields within the arts, she got her master degree in Fine Art – Art in the Public Realm – from Konstfack University of Arts Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Her work is conceptual and involves a variety of different media that challenges pre-conceived notions of the gallery and of the public. In recent years she has been primarily engaged in artistic research in which she examines the hybrid concept.
With a father from Palestine and a mother from Sweden, she related the concept to her own mixed origin, which in time came to be anchored to the post-colonial history (cultural hybridity). Using artistic means she approaches the issue from different perspectives. Examples of works that adjacent to this theme is “Cultural tourism”, a series of photographs in which she placed between her parents and “Älg i postformulerat tillstånd” (the so–called Camoose), a public sculpture placed at the intersection of Mikrofonvägen and Tellusborgsvägen in Stockholm. In “Oophaga vicentei × Oophaga pumilio” she has broadened her view of this synthesis by breeding a living hybrid, fertile, frog. The project aimed to develop a greater understanding of how hybrid processes (hybridization) appears and promote a discourse of a biological context and was first showed at the Museum of Natural History, Stockholm in 2010.
During her recent works she explores in more detail how practices and elements contained within this basic phenomenon can appear in the inter-disciplinary context. In 2011-2012, she conducted an artistic development project at Konstfack which aimed to foster an exchange between the artistic and forensic practice, with ambition to find out if the interaction could help to strengthen and extend the artistic activity. Later she collaborated with researchers at the Swedish National Defence College (FHS) and Royal Institute of Technolog (KTH) in Stockholm in order to develop new form expressions and methods, located at the intersection of the artistic discourse and the discussions and practices going on in the development of New Interactive Media. In 2015-2016 she further immersed these studies to explore ways in which the hybrid can be applied to critical issues concerning cultural heritage. For one year she worked at Gothenburg university, in a shared position between the Department of Conservation/ Natfak and the Faculty of Arts / HDK in Gothenburg.