Frida Lisa Carstensen Jersø: SICK

In SICK, Frida Lisa Carstensen Jersø explores the boundaries of illness, the body, and technology through various photographic media. Drawing from personal experiences with chronic illness, her work exists in the tension between the personal and the universal, between fragility and resilience as a sick, disabled young person.

The exhibition combines classical photography with medical imaging technologies. Through self-portraits Cartensen Jersø reveals the body in different stages of illness, recovery, and introspection - a body that carries both pain and strength. Alongside these images, she depicts various hospital environments with her camera, showing sterile beds, monitors, and medical equipment that offer a stark aesthetic contrast to the body. These images stem from the artist’s book FRIDA FOREVER, where documentary and staged photography intertwine to merge lived experience with the medical gaze.

In addition to the photographic works the exhibition consists of a video work and a scuplture. The latter is a replica of Carstensen Jersø’s spinal implant, that represents the integration between the body and medical technology. In the video we see a collection of medical scans, spanning all the way to the night Cartensen Jersø broke her back in 2012. Combined together with hospital footage, the scans offer a documentation of the transformation of her body and the confrontational experience of the clinical gaze.

SICK navigates the intersections of fascination and discomfort, science and aesthetics. Influenced by technology and crip theory, the works challenge conventional narratives of the disabled body—not as something to be pitied, but as something powerful, beautiful, and full of stories worth telling.

Frida Lisa Carstensen Jersø (b. 1997) is a photographer based in Copenhagen. Her practice engages with the fields of Sick Photography and Therapeutic Photography. Through photography, she examines the physical, emotional and societal aspects of being young, disabled, and chronically ill. Carstensen Jersø holds a BFA in Photography from HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg, Sweden. Before that, she attended Copenhagen Film and Photography School.

The exhibition is part of the gallery’s 2025-26 program called Textures of Security, which has been curated through an open call by the museum’s curatorial team and invited curator Farbod Fakharzadeh, and supported by The Finnish Heritage Agency.