Människans träd is a cherished local mural in Tensta, created in 1982 by artist Josephine Sisikind. The mural depicts a tree with branches and roots carrying the flags of different nations, playing on the central themes of the artist’s practice: the inner landscape of the human experience – identity, vulnerability, transformation and hope.
Through Palimpsest for a Fading Tree, artist duo Performing Pictures gives the mural a new life when night falls. As layers of light move across Människans träd, new images emerge. New layers of colour, movement, and sound bring the mural to life, creating a vibrant place where questions of transformation, cultural heritage, and possible utopias take shape.
It’s title refers to the palimpsest, an ancient and medieval manuscript in which an earlier text is erased and replaced with a new one, while traces of the original writing lingers visible beneath the surface.
Nobel Prize Facts
In dialogue with Nobel Prize laureate Ahmed Zewail’s research into the fleeting moments of chemical transformation, Palimpsest for a Fading Tree reflects on the paradoxical nature of light as both life-giving and destructive: the force that reveals an image and the same force that slowly causes it to disappear.
Zewail was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1999 “for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy”.
The work is also inspired by literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s early critique of nationalism. His vision of human and cultural belonging beyond states, passports, and inherited images of the enemy raises a central question within the work: What might community consist of if it were not founded on territory and power?
Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1913 “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.
NOBEL WEEK LIGHTS
5–13 December 2026 | 16:00–22:00
Stockholm City and Tensta
Performing Pictures
Artist duo Geska Helena Brečević and Robert Brečević work across exhibitions, public art, film, performance and publications. Their practice explores how images, materials and technologies convey memory, transformation and our experience of time.
Drawing on disciplines such as visual anthropology and media archaeology, they explore stillness and movement, intimacy and sudden shifts, creating situations in which images react, perform and sometimes blur the boundary between image and viewer. Through what they describe as “pictures that perform”, they create works in which ritual, technology, memory and apparition meet.
Josephine Siskind
Artist Josephine Siskind’s life and practice have spanned the United States, Mexico and Sweden. She spent fifteen years in Mexico, where she studied mural painting, before settling in Sweden and working extensively with public art.
Her monumental mural Människans träd that inspired this piece has become a well-known local landmark and an enduring part of Tensta’s identity.
NOBEL WEEK LIGHTS
A light art festival inspired by the Nobel Prize
5–13 December 2026 | Free admission