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.
VERNISSAGE torsdag 18 augusti 17-20
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.
English
Place: ID:I galleri Address: Tjärhovsgatan 19, Stockholm Time: 18 – 21 August, 2022, Opening 18 August 5 – 8 PM, opening hours are 12 – 6 pm Friday and 12 – 4 pm Saturday and Sunday Free admission
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.
Lais Myrrha Stockholm, summer 2022.
This expression refers to the title of an important tale of Brazilian literature written by Guimarães Rosa
HÖST 2022
26.8-18.9 Molekyl Galleri, Malmö
23.9 – 9.10 Åsa Andersson Broms
14.10-16.10 Migrant kitchen
21.10-30.10 Henrik Brandt
4.11-20.11 Dan Lageryd
25.11-11.12 Albin Karlsson
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