Born: Karlskrona, Sweden
Lives: Gothenburg, Sweden

Jesper Norda (b. 1972) has a background as a musician but half way trough his training to become a composer he changed into visual art. In 2002 he graduated with an MA from Valand school of fine arts in Gothenburg. Since then he has been working both with music and visual art. In both art forms with the same artistic consistency. In his visual art practice he expands the conceptual base into simple spatial operations made up of objects, text or light, sometimes linked to popular culture and sometimes linked to entirely personal experiences.

A main thread in his artistry is a constant questioning of the borderlines between sound and silence. The visual and the sounding materials are juxtaposed in conceptually challenging ways. Even if his works look and sound quite differently from theirs, he is probably the Swedish sound artist that is closest to the conceptual tradition of artists like La Monte Young, John Baldessari and Sol LeWitt. In the focusing on the real and factual, in the reduction of expressions down to only a few, where there arises a friction between the room and the emptiness. But the complexity that is the effect of this has not so much to do with theoretical questions, it gains it strength from an everyday listening, a communicating address, not least noticeable in the many works that take text as its starting point. - Magnus Haglund