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Arvida Byström is a Swedish artist born in 1991 near Stockholm, who mainly does photography but also music and modelling. She is based in Los Angeles, London and Stockholm. She cooperates with many magazines and brands: Nasty Gal, Monki, Wonderland Magazine, Lula Magazine, Vice, Rookie mag, Garage magazine, Baby Baby Baby magazine, I heart magazine…

Art and photography
She starts taking pictures at 12 with a digital camera, and doing a lot of selfies to “know the truth about how the world sees you”. Daughter of Internet, inspired at the beginning by Tumblr, starts posting at her account and taking part of a community of female artists questioning feminity and gender standards, using so-called a “girly” aesthetic and “girly coded stuff”. Continuing to take selfies and discovering feminism, Arvida starts taking pictures about period in the series There will be blood published in Vice on the 17 of May 2012. She also assumed and valorized female body hairs.

After growing up in Stockholm and still living at her parents’ house, she moved to London to take her independency. She makes her first fashion series for Monki, and creates her own gallery space, GAL, with a friend photographer Hanna Antonsson. They are curating emerging artists for one night shows. Though, she positions herself as being part of the popular culture more than the art world.

Member of the female collective The Ardorous, Arvida presents some of her pictures in Babe – a book published on the 1st of May 2015 including works of 30 other female artists, curated by Petra Collins.

The same year, she takes part of the exhibition Girls At Night On The Internet, curated by Grace Miceli, with artists like Petra Collins, Molly Soda and Maggie Dunlap, dealing with the misrepresentation of young artists like them on the art world, showing their work IRL.

Creating an online culture that reinvent body norms and self-empowerment, she also makes a performance with the artist Maja Malou Lyse, called Selfie Stick Aerobics. It’s a kind of a tutorial which learns how to make better selfies and feel beautiful by accepting your body. The 4 of October 2015, they publish a video about the performance on Youtube.

Being a star of Instagram, she explores self-identity as a queer women and questions sexualized women’s body. She decides to make a book with the artist Molly Soda about Instagram censorship. Pics or It Didn’t Happen: Images Banned From Instagram released on the 6 of March 2017 shows mostly pictures of women’s bodies which Instagram clearly wants to hide.