The duo Byström Källblad creates dance, performance, film, and installation works for public spaces, stages, and galleries. Visual artist Helena Byström and choreographer Anna Källblad share a deep commitment to expressions rooted in place, collaboration, and the times in which we live.
With equal measures of seriousness and humor, they craft concepts that respond to contemporary social challenges, seeking to shed light on complexity through choreography and visual art.
Their work has been presented in a wide range of contexts—from urban landscapes to rural environments, from sports arenas to nuclear power plants, libraries to cathedrals. Venues include Dansens Hus Stockholm, Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, Stockholm City Hall, Uppsala Cathedral, Kulturhuset, the Royal Dramatic Theatre, and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.
Byström Källblad are Big Pulse Dance Alliance selected artists and continue to create in both urban and rural settings across Sweden and internationally.
She Knows
Work-in-progress premiere 2026
A solo dancer moves among voices—a choir of bodies, a body of echoes. Together, they navigate the fragile terrain between solitude and solidarity, tracing time through motion, memory through sound. What long-buried knowledge, or even wisdom, can be brought into action in an age aching with urgency? She Knows is the third and final part of a trilogy by Byström Källblad, following City Horses and Calling We Are Here. A choreographic journey through the histories and presence of the female body—and experience in relation to power, public space, and representation—past and present.
Calling We Are Here at Uppsala Art Museum/Region Uppsala 2025
Premiered Sala, official celebration Sala 400 years 2024, and Västmanlandsmusiken
A celebration dance for inaugurations, manifestations, and turning points—a feminist folk dance honoring female experiences shared across borders, across time. Byström Källblad reimagines traditional dance through a feminist lens, drawing on female rituals to continue an exploration of the female body in public space—its presence, its power, its expression. Accompanied by a voice score composed by Karin Lindström Kolterud, the nine dancers perform kulning—a centuries-old vocal tradition once used by women in the mountain regions of Sweden, Norway, and Finland to call across great distances. Calling We Are Here is both memory and movement, a 21st-century folk dance to be carried forward—passed from body to body, generation to generation. Toured to Uppsala and Stockholm in 2025 and to Farsta in 2024. Read more here.
City Horses at MDT/Lustholmen/Nationalmuseum/Statens konstråd 2025
Premiered Dansens hus, Stockholm 2017. Read more here.
In our cities, on bronze horses, proud kings quietly stare above our heads. Their history and visual male dominance are daily manifested and passed on to future generations. Where are the women and their stories? This was the starting point for City Horses – a city choreography with twenty female dancers about power, existence, and the female body in the public space, a gallop through cities, a living monument in constant motion, celebrating female courage and the power of all ages. Since its premiere in 2017 at Dansens Hus, City Horses has toured Europe, Australia, Mexico, and will return to Stockholm at the Lustholmen festival hosted by MDT Moderna dansteatern, Statens konstråd, and The National Museum in 2025. More info here.
City Horses film installation at Sismograf 2025
What happens when a woman moves through public space without asking for approval, without conforming to norms? What does that feel like—in the body, in the gaze of others? Having toured from the far north of Sweden through Europe and all the way to Australia, with over a hundred women performing City Horses, Byström Källblad here invite the audience inside the experience. In a four-channel film installation, the viewer is drawn close to bodies, to voices, to moments of freedom and defiance. A tapestry of women moving through cities around the world, claiming space, rewriting the rules, and asking: what does female power feel like when it’s embodied—together? Stockholm Art Gallery Liljevalchs+ March-April 2023, Torinodanza Fonderie Limone 2024, Sismograf festival Olot 2025.
A Third Possibility Riksteatern/Dalateatern Falun 2025
A commissioned site-specific work, the title is inspired by a quote from Falun resident Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf: “There is always a third possibility, as long as you have the ability to find it.” Set in Falun—a former mining town once home to one of Europe’s largest copper mines, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site—the work explores the tension between hardship and joy, past and present. Working in dialogue with local women, both recent immigrants and those with deep generational roots in the region, Byström Källblad shaped a layered, collaborative piece. At its center: a dance solo by native Falun dancer Ida Hellsten, performed in the city square. Surrounding it: an installation of newly written quotes projected onto the walls of City Hall—an echo of voices, memories, and visions for the future. A poetic intervention in public space, A Third Possibility invites reflection on resilience, belonging, and the power of imagining otherwise. More info here.
Blånagla 2.0 in Husum/Konstfrämjandet 2025
For over a decade, the Blånagla project has brought dance and art into the old community dance barn in Husum—an ongoing conversation with place, memory, and change. Now, in response to the urban development initiative Grundsunda 2030, the project enters a new phase: Blånagla 2.0. With talk of transformation in Husum—what is truly changing, and what remains unseen? On October 4, Byström and Källblad return to Husum to present new works-in-progress: artistic reflections on a place caught between its industrial past and an uncertain future. More info here.
Blånagla Art Fest 2014-2024
A series of site-specific dance performances and art installations in the old community dance barn of Orrviken, Husum, unfolding over a decade (2014–2024).
Blånagla Art Fest explores a town in transition—from the rhythms of manual labor in the Industrial Age to the uncertain pulse of contemporary and future work life. Set in a bruksort—a town built in the early 1900s around a factory—the project reflects on what happens when locally rooted industries are replaced by distant corporate ownership, and when machines and automation begin to shape human roles across gender lines. How does identity shift when ownership becomes abstract, when robots take over, and when the memory of hands-on labor fades? What remains of belonging, of pride, of place? As climate change alters living conditions, and multinational companies deforest, speculate, and mine the landscape—paradoxically under the banner of “reduced carbon footprints”—Blånagla asks: From the memories we inherit, through the footprints we leave behind today—what memories will the future hold? More info here.
Works are supported by The Swedish Arts Council, Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Region Västmanland, Region Stockholm, City of Stockholm. Thank you to Hallen i Farsta.
Available for touring 2026:
She Knows
Calling We Are Here
City Horses
City Horses film installation