Elina Birkehag’s “Cow to A”

“Cow to A” takes its starting point from the theory that the Latin letter “A” evolved from ancient drawings of an ox’s head. Mesopotamian accounting systems for tracking animals developed into pictograms, then more complex notional models, and finally writing. The works on view at the Academy of Fine Arts represent Elina Birkehag’s response to the intriguing idea that the alphabet—in any script—evolved in tandem with the domestication of livestock.

There is a conceptual simplicity to Birkehag’s rejoinder. Black-and-white images superimpose the artist’s silhouette onto nondescript photographs of cows. The artist’s double exposures figure the body’s delayed contact with a photographic archive, which documents several months she spent at commercial dairies on the outskirts of Stockholm during the fall of 2024. Her whole body is figured as a negative shape reclining in Cow Position 5 (all works 2025 unless otherwise stated), one of the larger prints, or bending over awkwardly, her fingers outstretched, in Cow Position 1. In Cow Position 4 she uses her hands to make udder-like shapes in the blank space of the photograph. In a smaller series of prints, including Cow Positions 28, 29, and 32, just her hands are posed overlapping the wide angle of each bovine head, as though Birkehag were playing in the dark of a video installation to keep a small child entertained. She reaches towards the origin of the alphabet with her body, heavily pregnant in some shots, to find a soberly Swedish iteration of écriture feminine.1

“Cow to A” is the exhibitory conclusion of the prestigious year-long Bernadotte Fellowship at the Academy of Fine Arts. In addition to several dozen photographs, the show includes a series of live performances produced in collaboration with musician Benjamin Lavén (bem subot) entitled “Shadow Exercises.” In them, the artist moves through letter-shaped positions as a shadow figure, a black form against an intense, warm yellow beam of light. There are three events, their scheduled dates and times stenciled on one wall in black vinyl, but the screen onto which Birkehag’s live-writing will play or has already unfolded is installed in the middle of the gallery, imposing and blank, throughout the whole run of the exhibition: mute and waiting to be touched.

“Language like a knife slipping in,” Birkehag writes in D is for Daughter, a book project she published in 2023. “Grass in the mouth. Animals in the round, chewing.” D is for Daughter elliptically documents the backstory to Birkehag’s exhibition: three centuries of carvings into live trees and the wooden beams of seasonal shelters wrought by young women sent to pasture livestock during the intensely luminous summer months. This temporary gendered segregation is called the fäbod tradition. It is a practice dating to medieval Scandinavia of sending groups of young women into nature, unsupervised by men, away from villages and towns. “[W]hy do we send them to a forest constellated with animals, why must they care for them as for language, letters which for 300 years do not burn but sink deeper into nonhuman skin, clarion, then obscure,” writes Birkehag. With her camera and with latex molds, Birkehag reproduces the etched graffiti women made when they were alone with their cows, the creatures at the origin of language. If D is for Daughter looks to the fluid continuum of history, Cow and A is pitched forward, to a grammar that must emerge now.

The political philosopher Erin Manning enjoins the reader of Politics of Touch (2007) to “think agrammatically.” Specifically, Manning argues that touch rather than interpolation is better adapted to formulating a politics-to-come. Touch sense is prosthetic, meaning that it occurs in the space of indeterminacy—between the cow and Birkehag, and between the screen and the shadow cast by a body. It is of the body but also outside it, non-existent before contact with something else. As I leave Birkehag’s single-room exhibition, I think about what it would take to stop being enraged about how ineffective analytical articulations are of what is going wrong and just move, sensing, without a guarantee of stability, into the language that is to come.