Bogdan Szyber on stage beside an inflatable waving figure in yellow and magenta stage light. Svenska

Art & Text

Bogdan
Szyber

Almost fifty years on stage, in parks, on public squares, in disused shipyards, in lighthouses and bomb shelters.

Books

The cover of Yrsel by Bogdan Szyber, Fri Tanke.

Dolly Zoom — a literary performance

Published in Swedish as Yrsel · Fri Tanke förlag, 2026 · more about the book

For forty-five years I made performance art with Carina Reich — just over ninety productions, from mud baths and drownings on small stages to opera houses and castle parks. We put a death metal band in the orchestra pit of the Royal Swedish Opera, read Stagnelius to cows, and paid thirty-six people to spend a day begging on Drottninggatan, Stockholm's main shopping street. When it emerged that they were employed, Swedish public radio retracted its own report.

None of it gave me my largest media breakthrough. That came in 2020, when I became the first artistic researcher in Sweden to have a doctoral thesis failed.

The book goes through all of it, but it is not a defence. It is a book about a man who spent his life staging things and then claiming they were real, and who now writes his life and claims it is true.

The cover of Fauxthentication by Bogdan Szyber.

Fauxthentication — Art, Academia & Authorship

(or the site-specifics of the Academic Artist) · Stockholm University of the Arts, 2020

An investigation into what can be manufactured inside the boundaries of artistic research: who is permitted to produce signs of value, and why. I bought art production online, hired a composer in Los Angeles and exhibited 10 % of all doctorate-holding artistic researchers in Sweden at the Swedish History Museum.

The thesis was defended at Stockholm University of the Arts on 15 May 2020 and failed. It is available in full for download from the National Library of Sweden.

Bogdan Szyber holds up the burning thesis, a blowtorch in his hand, in front of laboratory glassware.
Fool’s Errand: an Alchemical Sonata · 2024 Photo: Anders Thessing Performance at Konträr, Stockholm. Nine theses in all were ritually burned and eaten.
Work in progress

Dit kroppen faller — Where the Body Falls

In Wuppertal the city hangs its bodies above a river. A narrator descends into a factory awaiting demolition and begins an archaeology of those who fell there — a baby elephant, a dance cult, a locked ward — before the building itself becomes the last body to fall.

Selected works

Four people dressed in white sit on a floor beneath tilted lines and a large shadow.
Eaten by Men · 1985 Photo: Jan Rüsz
Figures in black strapped high up on concrete pillars beneath a viaduct.
Beautiful Sadness · 1989 Photo: Anders Thessing
Two bodies huddled in mud under falling water.
Falcon Crest · 1990 Photo: Helene Schmitz
Two performers in front of a red spiral backdrop, one in a silver dress, the other masked in red on a rolling board.
Music for a Darkened Theatre · 2008 Photo: Mats Bäcker
A figure in tails and a penguin mask sits curled up in a blue ball chair.
Mr Gloom · 2024 Photo: Bogdan Szyber

Works 1985–2024 produced by Reich+Szyber. More in the archive at reich-szyber.com.

About

Portrait of Bogdan Szyber, seated against a concrete wall covered in graffiti.

Bogdan Szyber was born in 1958 in Zabrze, Poland, and came to Sweden at the age of eleven. For forty-five years he has worked across performance and visual art, with an emphasis on site-specific pieces. From 1980 he ran the company Reich+Szyber with Carina Reich — just over ninety productions, from small stages to opera houses and castle parks.

The complete body of stage work is documented in the archive at reich-szyber.com.

’Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.

— Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia

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