Bigert & Bergström b. 1965/1962

After 40 years of collaboration, Bigert & Bergström are best known for their large-scale installations, public works, and performances. Their practice often operates at the intersection of art, science, and social issues, with a particular focus on climate, technology, and our relationship with nature. In their projects, they combine humor, seriousness, and poetic strategies to highlight new perspectives on contemporary global challenges.

In the new exhibition Scrupulus, the focus is on the smallest sculpture the artist duo has ever created. “The work Scrupulus is a tiny 6 mm sculpture that you can keep in your shoe. It consists of a one-carat raw diamond that will chafe noticeably when you take it with you for a walk around the city” explain Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström. 

After personally engaging with the work, art critic Blake Gopnik describes Scrupulus as “... a work of art that gets us thinking about the very notion of the artistic, putting art’s discomfiting fuck-up-ed-ness on the table (and in our footwear) for our contemplation, when in the standard course of things even art often goes down far too easy”. – excerpt from exhibition text by Blake Gopnik.

The Roman philosopher Cicero was the first to use the word scrupuli as a metaphor for worry, likening it to irritating stones in one’s shoe. The word unscrupulous later came to describe people without a conscience—a central theme of the exhibition, which oscillates between the sharp light of science and the smokescreens of climate denial.

“The diamond’s carbon content is the same as the amount of carbon currently found in one cubic meter of air—0.25 grams, or around 430 parts per million according to today’s measurements. And that is unique. No other upright-walking hominid has ever experienced anything like this” say Bigert & Bergström.

Visitors to the exhibition can not only take a diamond home in their shoe, but also become part of collected climate data from a permafrost area in Abisko in the Northern part of Sweden. The exhibition’s largest work is a curtain of glass beads where the image of a diagram emerges in real time. The climate data consists of CO₂ measurements originating from Bigert & Bergström’s land art project Sensing the Arctic, located in Abisko.

As visitors walk through the curtain of data points, they encounter a large black sphere titled Denial Machine. The sphere moves menacingly up and down in futile attempts to magnetically capture a pile of metallic weather symbols.

In addition, the exhibition includes smaller sculptures and photographic works. With inventiveness and humor, Bigert & Bergström shine a light on one of humanity’s greatest challenges. In Scrupulus, we are thrown between light and darkness in a presentation that does not shy away from dramatic gestures.

Mats Bigert, born in 1965, and Lars Bergström, born in 1962, have collaborated since 1986. They studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm from 1986 to 1990. The duo has carried out numerous exhibitions and public projects, both in Sweden and internationally. Recent solo projects include Broken Greenhouse – Embodied Climate Futures, Lund Botanical Garden (2025); Tipping Point, Djurgården, Stockholm (2022); Hurricane Party, Norrtälje Art Hall (2022); and CO₂ Lock-In, Stockholm School of Economics (2020). Broken Greenhouse will be presented at Bergianska Trädgården outside Stockholm in collaboration with Accelerator in autumn 2026.

The acclaimed social sculpture Solar Egg (2017) has been exhibited and toured in Sweden and internationally since its first installation in Kiruna.

In 2025, Bigert & Bergström received the Art for the Globe Award, one of Sweden’s most prestigious cultural prizes.