Makode Linde / Peter Johansson

Makode Linde and Peter Johansson already met at the Moderna museet in Stockholm in 2012 when Makode performed the very famous work of art Painful Cake where Peter was one of the organizers and held out the knife that would cut the cake, for the Swedish Minister of Culture.
To quote Wikipedia:
Linde’s art attracted international attention through an event at the Moderna museet in Stockholm in April 2012. For the 75th anniversary of the Artists’ National Organization (KRO), he had been invited to design a cake that would later be called Painful Cake. He made the cake in the form of a black Venus from Willendorf, but with his own head made up as a classic caricature of black people, a so-called “golliwogg” which is similar to “blackface”. When the first piece of cake was cut, apparently from the woman’s abdomen, the artist screamed. It was videotaped and the effect was increased by the first piece of cake being cut by Minister of Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth. Many considered the artwork to be racist and the incident was reported to the Ombudsman. The National Association of Afro-Swedes demanded the resignation of the Minister of Culture. The artist claimed to be misunderstood and claimed that the work instead depicted “how whites symbolically consume blacks, dismember their body parts and eat”.
When the event was over, Linde brought home leftover cake. Linde and Adelsohn Liljeroth never had any conflict about the incident and became friends on Facebook. After the big uproar, Linde posted a post where he wrote something like “I have some cake if someone comes over with some Valium”, to which Adelsohn Liljeroth replied “Thank you, I am full”.

Since 2019, the duo Peter Johansson and Makode Linde have been working together for a major exhibition, where films, photographs, objects and sculpture will create a basis for questions about racism and bigotry.

2020, the duo Peter Johansson and Makode Linde participated with a proposal Sagnlandet (The Land of Legends) for participation in the Danish pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2022. Curator was the Chinese artist and activist Ai Wei Wei. The project was rejected.