Etikettarkiv: Jenny Magnusson

IASPIS på ID:I

Välkommen till en kollektiv utställning med verk av IASPIS ateljestipendiater Neil Brownsword, Yishay Garbasz, Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren, Dan Halter, Sara Kaaman, Jenny Magnusson, Lais Myrrha, Angela Su och Benno Voorham.

Utställningen pågår t.o.m. 21 augusti
Öppet fredag 12-18.
lördag-söndag 12-16

”Det har gått mer än två månader sedan de flesta av oss kom till Stockholm. Trots geografiska, kulturella och andra särdrag har vissa släktskap med våra olika konstnärliga inriktningar blivit uppenbara sedan vi först träffades i IASPIS-köket. De många samtalen, filmvisningarna, festerna, middagarna, konserterna, museibesöken, båtturer, delande av musik och utflykter till simhallen, har gjort att vi på ett bättre sätt kan ta det utrymme vi befinner oss i nu i anspråk. (…)”
Läs hela texten av Lais Myrrha på engelska nedan.

ID:I Galleri är ett konstnärsdrivet galleri som startade 2003 och där 27 medlemmar driver verksamheten och hyr lokalen tillsammans. 

The Future as Negative Spaces Welcome to a collective exhibition with works by IASPIS residents Neil Brownsword, Yishay Garbasz, Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Weronika Bela & Ivar Hagren, Dan Halter, Sara Kaaman, Jenny Magnusson, Lais Myrrha, Angela Su and Benno Voorham. ”How long Do works endure? As long As they are not completed. Since as long as they demand effort They do not decay. ” Bertolt Brecht The Future as Negative Spaces More than two months have passed since a part of us arrived in Stockholm. Despite geographical, cultural and other idiosyncrasies, some affinities of our different research backgrounds have become apparent since we first met in the IASPIS kitchen. The many conversations, film screenings, parties, dinners, concerts, museum visits, boat trips, the sharing of music and excursions to the swimming pool, have allowed us to inhabit in a better way the space we are in now. There is a common point worth noting: most of us were born during the Cold War and felt its temperature more or less intensely. Perhaps, because we experienced this historical period, we learned, that borders are not fixed entities, but designs of an epoch. That even solid, heavy industrial poles can simply relocate in search of cheaper labour, leaving behind tons of waste, relegating entire cities and populations to a state of almost complete abandonment. It is not by chance that borders, ruins, detritus from industries and buildings, fields of raw material extraction, accelerated obsolescence of objects and professions, economic monopolies, subjection, control, and annihilation of historically oppressed bodies, are themes running through the works presented here. All these problems have become ever more evident, in their recurring presence, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent global domination of neoliberalism. As artists, we try to remain vigilant, having not lost our capacity to be haunted in front of it. Almost all of us have seen the supposed end of the Cold War, Latin American dictatorships, and other authoritarian regimes promoted by the United States of America in its crusade against communism. Like ruins, authoritarianism did not disappear and even today fragments of the wall dividing Germany are sold on eBay and Amazon, which, in turn, work as a good metaphor for the new face of global capitalism in its financialized and technocratic version, insofar as it takes or wants to take possession of people from the inside (the word souvenir is handy in this case). It is against this fetishization and commodification of memory, the taking over of subjectivity that the artist’s hand brushes over the paper to draw the closing moments where bodies succumb to police violence, to wars, to states. Insisting on such scenes forces us to gaze at (and to remember) the countless bodies that were and are sacrificed as fuel to feed the capitalist machine. If capitalism, like a snake, needs to shed its skin from time to time to grow and fatten, we are the ones who look for the dead tissues it leaves behind. Slack, diaphanous, and torn, these skins indicate a double presence, both of the past and the future. It is a warning not to forget that the bodies once covered by them are now protected by a surface more suited to their size, more resistant, and more falsely transparent. For me, the works exhibited here are like these skins: the sign of something that has been displaced into surrounding space, leaving a trace, a presence in what is to come. Scraps of ceramics, aged photographic papers, old images extracted from archives, unfinished constructions, old maps, board games, youth… For Walter Benjamin, the era of the technological reproducibility of the image corresponds to the moment where things lose their cult value, but not absolutely. For Benjamin, photographs of the faces of our loved ones, dead or missing, are the last refuge of the ‘aura’. These portraits are not themselves the objects of our love, but of what we reencounter through them. Like portraits and the serpent’s skins, the objects are portals. And what about these faces? Where can they be found in this exhibition? Inside boxes of aged photosensitive paper, that time has turned completely grey? In the vision of empty borders with their bridges and defence devices whose names seem taken from a fantastic tale? In the letters, we send to ourselves? In the hands that operate, at a distance, machines digging the earth to extract clay? Submerged in the serene waters of the sea, on the third bank of the river 1 * , or in the gaze, voice and gestures of children whose infancy was marked by the experience of war? In the delicate work of painting, porcelain carried out in the midst of ruins, between cigarettes? The faces in this exhibition are everywhere, everything here is the serpent’s skin, vestiges much like the photographs of loved ones, which carry with them our present only because they give colour, in a double movement, to the past and to the future. Each of the works on display appears as a blow and absence that has escaped official history, detached itself from a kind of world that has done its best to forge a state of general indifference: to otherness, death, and anything that lies beyond the established boundaries. Firstly, let us recall what is meant by indifference, as both apathy and a lack of receptivity to the other. The other as an eternally foreign category which threatens the stability of conventions and egos, of politics, of beliefs, of the boundaries that divide cities, neighbourhoods and people. The self-seen as other, The Other Selves, because to belong to this world of indifference one cannot but look at death, to the ‘wear and tear’ of bodies themselves, without losing oneself, without putting oneself outside one’s own ‘self’. In this tedious world, old age will never be understood and celebrated as the opening of multiple futures, but only, irremediably, as the loss of one single past, that of youth. To condemn the people to eternal youth is thus to deprive them of a future. Ah, the limits… of bodies, of mentalities, of territories, of the conventions that regulate different times and spaces. They are all at once imaginary and brutally real lines, drawn and guarded by the sort of inexhaustible effort present in the apparent and artificial stillness of borders, ICUs, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons. To maintain this monotony requires a gigantic workforce, a proliferation of surveillance mechanisms, massive quantities of resources, violence, apathy, and amnesia. All this effort requires an extra force that operates in the extra fields of official representations. It is precisely in this direction that this exposition is pointing to a space outside of the frame. And this negative space is seen through the intervals between one photograph and another, not always candid, of women involved in sewing activities, over the thousands of candles and cigarettes lit by Swedish matches, or by the unmeasured resources and expectations contained in the process of obtaining a small and disappointing pile of clay. At least, not only brutality can be felt by its negative space, but also love: the longing, the absence, the memory of the last look, the last breath, the last touch before the body goes cold. Remember the serpent’s skins? They condense different times: they are images of the future as negative space, surfaces that shaped a presence, a body, and cut open to make room for the future. Negative space is not a concrete and closed mould, it has neither outside nor inside, it is the inside out, torn skin. It is the clothes that no longer fit us and brings with it a warning. For this reason, perhaps anachronistically, we continue to cross bridges backwards, to strive stubbornly to find new ways of generating poetry. It is what justifies our being together in this small space, giving us the necessary courage to contemplate the dragon’s gaping teeth with the joy to continue dancing, to trace hot planes over obsolete maps and to speak – far away from armies – the silent language of forms, of images, and of bodies. This is our effort.

Är där här

Kapitel ett – Är där här

Det är i början eller slutet av dagen, men för de sex konstnärerna som är inuti rummet och mellan rummen är det sak samma.

Solens gång märks på skuggorna och med det ljus och mörker som tränger sig på och tar sig in, men det som sker därute ekar bara svagt härinne och sköljs över av det större ekot. Det som här är där och där här. Det rum som är i rummet, det rum som är mellan dessa rum. Där är de, de sex konstnärerna, de står vid varsin väggsida av den hexagon som bildar det rum i rummet som i sin tur innesluter alla möjligheter. På ett sätt är de i det otroligt främmande. På ett annat är de i den självklara närhet som de själva valt.

Så händer något. En av dem tar några steg framåt mot den punkt där väggen viker sig i en vinkel. Hon kikar runt hörnet och ser någon till vilken det finns en precis relation. Hon har bjudit in eller bjudits in av den andre. De har bjudit in eller bjudits in till att vara där, här i rummet, befinna sig vid en av hexagonens sex väggsidor och använda det kikhål in i det mittersta rummet som varje vägg är utrustad med.

Rummet i mitten är ett rum från litteraturen, i den utgåva som de hänvisar varandra till på sida 38 Marguerite Duras Älskaren. Kanske är de alla där, men bara kanske. För mellan inbjudningarna är tre okända för en annan, är tre så otroligt främmande att de inte kan veta förrän de är här om dessa tre existerar, om hexagonen existerar. I rummet på sida 38 på Tjärhovsgatan 19.

Chapter one – Is there here

It is in the beginning or the end of the day. To the six artists inside and in between the rooms it is however just the same.

The sun’s path shows in the shadows and in the intruding light and darkness, but what happens out there is only a weak echo lost in the deeper echo: What is here is there and here there: In the space inside the room, and in between these rooms. There they are, the six artists, each one standing next to one side of the hexagon that creates the space inside the room, that space which in turn encloses all possibilities. In one respect, this makes them incredibly estranged. In another respect, their closeness to each other is obvious and chosen.

Then something happens. One of them takes a step forward towards the section where the wall is folding. She looks around the corner and recognizes someone to whom she has a precise relation: She has invited or been invited by the other. They have invited or been invited to be there, here in the space, to be next to one of the hexagon’s six walls, and use the peephole each wall is equipped with so as to look into the middle room.

The room in the middle derives from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, in the edition they are referring to on page 38. Maybe all of them are there, but only maybe. In the sequence of invitations, three of the other remain unknown to each of them, so utterly unknown that they cannot know before everyone is there if the other exists, if the hexagon exists. Here in the room on page 38 at Tjärhovsgatan 19.

Is there here

Vernissage 7 February 17.00 – 20.00

Opening speech 18.00

Renissage 14 February 12.00 – 16.00