Malmö Fotobiennal Catalogue 2017

THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE 09-18 JUNE 2017 CATALOGUE PRODUCED BY FOTOGRAFI I FOKUS

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PUBLICATION This catalogue was produced and published on the occasion of Malmö Fotobiennal 2017.

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CONCEPT Fotografi i Fokus

Cover Photo: Philipp Gallon, Augment, 2016

DESIGN Marcio Souza

Copyright: © Malmö Fotobiennal 2017 | copyright owners of individual essays are their respective authors | copyright owners of the photographs: see photo credits (E&OE)

FOTOGRAFI I FOKUS BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND BIENNALE’S CURATORS: Michel Thomas Marcio Souza Susanna Hesselberg Jeanette Land Schou

5 INTRODUCTION Michel Thomas

6-9 THE CONTEMPTUOUS DISHONESTY OF THE IMAGE Lars Diurlin

10-11 TRUMP AND THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Robert Zaretsky

12-13 UN-SPECTACLE THE SPECTACLE Pontus Kyander

15-35 FOTOBIENNAL PRESENTS:

16 22 30

Nathalie Daoust Subjektiv Omar Victor Diop

36-41 MALMÖ’S BURNING Clements Altgård

43-105 SELECTED WORKS:

44 Gilles Alonso 48 Louis De Belle 52 Julian Birbrajer 56 Ole Christiansen

60 62 68 72 76 80 84 88 92 96 98 102

Mats Eriksson Dunér Philipp Gallon Ole Marius Joergensen Lucie Khahoutian AmélieLandry Ulf Lundin Charlotte Lybeer Adrien Pezennec Robert Rutöd Daniele Sambo Simone Sapienza Per-Olof Stoltz

107-147 LOCAL PERSPECTIVES:

108 Digitaliseum 110 Dunkers Kulturhus 116 Fotogalleriet [format] 120 Fotografisk Center 120 Galleri David Hall 122 G3 - Lokstallarna 128 Fotoskolan Munka 130 Galleri CC 132 Molekyl Gallery 134 Galleri Knutkalaset 138 Malmö Museer 140 Malmö Högskola 142 Panora 147 Galleri Rostrum

148-150 BILDENS FÖRAKTFULLA FÖRLJUGENHET Lars Diurlin

4

THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE MALMÖ FOTOBIENNAL 2017

The French writer and situationist Guy Debord wrote his thesis The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. The discussion then was about the pictures hypnotic capacity. The debates, among the situationist, on the representation of our societies were then animated and dynamic. Two decades later, a new popular culture and the consumer society emerged. The photographic image lost some of it´s aura, exploited and presenting a fake mirror reflection and selling the images of a perfect society with the promises of personal contentment. Today, on the political scene, alternative realities and fake news are now being shaped.

The mobile digital technology has made photography so easy that it actually replaces the written language of our primary means of communication. By sharing our images on social media and, as envoys for the new artificial paradise, we are contributing ourselves to establish the current social norms and creating our own “society of the spectacle”.

The process is on going. It is 50 years since G. Debord wrote his essay but the debate is more up-to-date than ever before. In a world where visual communication thrives and takes a new role, it is important to understand its influence and its mechanism and to take control back over the images. It is about liberating our minds from the market premises and creating a new framework for the contemporary photography.

The biennial is living thanks to all photographers, artists, gallery owners, academics, students, volunteers and our board dedicated work. We also want to thank Malmö City and Region Skåne for their vital contribution. In conclusion, I quote a few lines from F. Mercury song from 1991 -The show must go on: What are we living for? -abandoned places -I guess we know the score -on and on, does anybody know what we are looking for? -Another hero, another mindless crime -behind the curtain, in the pantomime -hold the line, does anybody want to take it anymore...

The show must go on.

1967 skrev Guy Debord essän The society of the Spectacle. Diskussionen då handlade om bildens hypnotiska förmåga. Debatterna, bland situationisterna, om representationen av våra samhällen var då animerad och dynamisk. Två decennier senare uppkom en ny populärkultur och konsumentsamhället. Den fotografiska bilden förlorade då en del av sin aura, missbrukades och visade en skev spegelbild av ett perfekt samhälle med löften om personlig tillfredsställelse. I dag, på den politiska scenen, skapas alternativa verkligheter och falska nyheter. Den mobila digitala tekniken har gjort fotografering så enkelt att det faktiskt ersätter det skriftliga språk som primär kommunikationsmedel. Genom att dela våra bilder på sociala medier och som budbärare för det nya artificiella paradiset, bidrar vi själva till att etablera de nuvarande sociala normerna och skapa vårt eget skådespelssamhället.

Processen är pågående. Det är 50 år sedan G. Debord skrev sitt manifest men debatten är mer aktuell än någonsin. I en värld där visuell kommunikation frodas och intar ny roll är det viktigt att förstå dess kraft och dess mekanism och ta tillbaka makten över bilden. Det handlar om att befria våra sinnebilder från marknadens premisser och skapa ett nytt ramverk för det samtida fotografiet.

Biennalen lever tack vare alla fotografer, konstnärer, gallerister, akademiker, studenter, frivilliga och vår styrelses dedikerade arbete. Vi vill även tacka Malmö stad och region Skåne för deras viktiga bidrag. Som avslutning citerar jag några rader från F. Mercury låt från 1991 -The show must go on: What are we living for? -abandoned places -I guess we know the score -on and on, does anybody know what we are looking for? -Another hero, another mindless crime -behind the curtain, in the pantomime -hold the line, does anybody want to take it anymore...

The show must go on.

Michel Thomas Ordförande | Malmö fotobiennal 2017

Michel Thomas Head of the board | Malmö fotobiennal 2017

Charlotte Lybeer Jes 2016 5

THE CONTEMPTUOUS DISHONESTY OF THE IMAGE - GUY DEBORD, SITUATIONISM AND THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE LARS DIURLIN The nature of situationism and its founder Guy Debord are exceedingly elusive, and they also constantly endeavoured to be precisely this. A genuine avant-garde movement never stops, that is self-evident. However, while showing due deference, the undersigned shall make a brave attempt to slow down, if only for a very brief moment, this movement and fix it onto paper. In connection with a biennial focusing on photography we will now see examples of both the contemptuous dishonesty of the image and the society of the spectacle that replaces reality when the space around us congeals, when the subjective reality of life becomes an objectified image – what Debord calls the society of the spectacle.

Debord encounters lettrism We begin our journey in the vernal sun of Southern France, where we meet the recently arrived, youthful and cheeky lettrist movement, created in post-war Paris by the almost megalomaniacal artist Isidore Isou. Isou took over when Dadaism and surrealism ceased to add something new to avant-garde art and the critique of it. Isou felt that Baudelaire annihilated the anecdote, Verlaine poetry, Rimbaud metre, and Tristan Tzara the word. If Tzara’s Dadaism, with its onomatopoetic declamations, saw its task as breaking down poetry into disconnected and meaningless albeit complex ‘words’, Isou wanted to go even further and, as the movement’s name indicates, free the smallest component: the letter. Isou was also a film-maker, and in 1952 he was at the Cannes film festival to make sure that his controversial Traité de bave et d’éternité would actually be screened. And it was, accompanied by the eager boos of the audience, in a true avant-garde manner.

Someone who did not boo was Guy Debord, who was in the audience this night. However, only the four-hour-long 6

soundtrack of the film was ‘shown’, because the pictorial material had not been finished on time. This was, however, totally in line with Isou’s complete contempt of photography, and he proclaimed, ‘At a time when humanity is completely obsessed with beautiful images the task is to destroy these images’. When the potential of a form of art becomes saturated it only adds an obese excess, and Isou likened the medium of film to a fattened pig that would soon die of its own accord in a metabolic explosion of fat and disgusting matter caused by an intestinal obstruction. The cinematic image must, like literature, be deconstructed and broken down into its smallest common denominators, through what Isou called the aesthetics of discrepancy cinema: a mastication, digestion, and regurgitation of yesterday’s masterpieces.

To a changed Paris Completely captivated, Debord chose to accompany Isou and his ilk back to Paris, and settle down in the shabby artists’ quarter, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was also a haunt of various members of the Paris underworld. The powerful centrifugal force of urbanism was in the process of casting out unwanted elements from the centre to gigantic and cold banlieues – all in order to pave the way for the automobile, the constant authority of the street network, where humanity, inside these claustrophobic cast metal forms, has succeeded in isolating itself from the surrounding world, now also when outside the home.

Alongside the street is the advertising sign, the mainstay of capitalism that completes the décor of consumerism.

The prevailing economic ideology is materialised in architecture, spatially uniform and functional à la the architect Le Corbusier. No unwanted elements must hinder the Big Brother-like gaze of the spectacle across a naked, austere Alphaville of reality. And where

did all the people who previously populated the city streets really go?

The society of the spectacle, with its recently created domesticated fantasies, literally moved into the home during this time, in the form of diverse mass-media phenomena, and with them came humanity. Here, there had now been constructed an artificial need for staying within the isolated hearth of the home, where, after a day’s work, one is confronted with the ‘entertainment’ of the spectacle, which, like a veritable Sandman, transforms one’s household goods into a quiet bear’s den. And in the street outside, humanity’s absence echoes, desolately as in the dehumanised landscapes in the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico.

Nevertheless, during the first years of the 1950s, Saint-Germain-des-Prés at any rate offered, to a certain extent, the possibility of disappearing, of going underground – one way to escape the petrifying Gorgon’s gaze of the spectacle. This desire to shun the limelight and to the greatest extent possible avoid being canonised would become fundamental for situationists in general and for Debord in particular.

Because the spectacle negated life, the spectacle would in itself also be negated. Debord emphasised that what constituted the traces of one’s life, be it art or footprints along the ever more uniform streets of Paris, only benefited the bloodhounds of the police.

Paris had undergone a relentless urban metamorphosis. On the one hand, the surrounding environment seems to come to a halt and become fixed in sterile cement blocks carefully placed to create the correct geometry, and on the other hand, contradictorily enough, the city is perceived to be ever more ephemeral. The world around us is moving at an ever increasing pace, but in the same predictable direction. In the middle of this oxymoronic paradox of conformist changeableness, in this by commercialism ravaged battlefield with its inverted trenches in the sky, we

THE CONTEMPTUOUS DISHONESTY OF THE IMAGE - GUY DEBORD, SITUATIONISM, AND THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE · Lars Diurlin

find Debord, cursing what is happening before his eyes to the city of Paris.

To him, the street represented a vivid meeting place for people, not on the move, but on voyages of discovery.

Through dérive, drifting, one should venture out into the nooks and crannies of the city and succeed in voluntarily becoming lost, and thus, like Thomas De Quincey’s opium eater, try to find the North-West Passage of real life – an attempt to find a place outside the spectacle and reveal the indistinct craquelure in the spectacle’s falsified image of reality, to find the scratches in the representation.

Toward an art without works; a total negation It is no exaggeration to claim that Debord’s first film is almost as far from the, in popular parlance, established concept of ‘film’ as one can get. It is an anti-film. An anti-work. A negation. If Isou claimed to be able to give shape to nothingness, Debord managed to go one step further in Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952). The film contains no images whatsoever, is seventy-five minutes long and consists of a white image shown whenever voices are

heard on the soundtrack. When there is silence it is also completely black.

The final scene consists of twenty-four minutes of silence. As can be expected, the audience did not sit quiet and still during the screening at Ciné-club d’Avant-Garde. The chairman of the film club cut the screening short fairly quickly, but at any rate those present had the time to listen to the opening proclamations of the film, read by Isou: ‘Just as the screening began, GuyErnest Debord should have stepped out in front of the screen and given an introduction. Had he done so, he would have said, “There is no film.

Cinematic film is dead. Film can no longer be created. If you wish we can discuss this matter.”’ Consequently, Debord had deprived the audience of its voyeuristic pleasures, caused a break in the fetishising attitude of the passive viewer to representations, to the cinematic image, where the viewer prefers the representation to reality, the copy to the original – a veritable alarm clock for the somnambulists in the cinema’s auditorium. Like a Brechtian verfremdungseffekt but produced without a work, just a sudden empty interval in the otherwise

seamless repetitive representation of cultural consumption. Thus Debord begins a hostile relationship with this contemplative observer of the spectacle’s images. What took shape now was an aesthetics of obscurity, a true art of living. An art without works. From now on, no art would be created, only lived, and Debord’s only permanent work during the subsequent years was a 1953 statement of position scribbled in crayon that well summarises Debord’s refusal to incorporate himself in the machinery of the market: ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais!’.

Can the revolution be materialised?

The ambition to revolutionise everyday life contradicts the reluctance to be seen. One enters the stage, but once in the spotlight one is struck by the idea that the gaze of the audience has the power to congeal one’s being, to canonise one’s art, one’s thoughts, and thus one immediately becomes a part of yesterday, and yesterday’s revolution is completely uninteresting – the oh so precarious problematics of the avant-garde. The works of Debord, the lettrists and later the situationists 7

are continually struggling with the fact of their own concrete existence.

Debord’s second film, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959), remains distanced from its audience and consciously hides from our gaze and refuses to adopt the ‘natural’ form of film: ‘Of course one could have made a film about this. But even if this film would have become just as incoherent and unsatisfying as the reality it reflects, it would nevertheless have remained a recreation – as poor and false as this bad tracking’, we hear Debord’s laconic voice-over proclaim while we witness a deliberately poor shot.

If Sur le passage… primarily problematised film itself as a medium, we find this societal lack of context clearly and distinctly accounted for, as well as embodied and reflected, in the third film, Critique de la separation (1961).

This film is quite simply deliberately unsatisfactory in its expression, because one can only demonstrate the actual defectiveness of society, demystify and de-fetishise it, by means of an unsatisfactory image – a kind of mimesis of incoherence, which could be translated as a mimicking of society’s lack of coherence, of context. The more coherent and satisfactory the film, the more passive the spectator. Debord’s films are not broken mirrors that fragmentarily reflect a homogeneous reality, but a complete reflection of a fragmentary, crackled ‘reality’. This problematics shines through even regarding situationism as a whole. It is never as mercurially difficult to grasp as 8

when it has just assumed an almost veritable form, best illustrated a bit into Debord’s fourth film, La Société du spectacle (1973), when suddenly white letters against a black background inform the viewer that ‘If the rhythm of the film now continues, then maybe a certain cinematic value would emerge. But it will not continue.’

Debord’s lack of trust in the cinematic image is not completely dissimilar to his countryman Jean-Luc Godard’s contempt for it. Godard often calls attention to the dishonest qualities of the image, for instance in British Sounds (1968): ‘The photograph is never a reflection of reality, only an image of it’, and similarly in Vent d’Est (1969), ‘Ce n’est pas une image juste, ce juste un image’. But where Godard is content with the awareness implicit in declaring that an image is a lie, a representation and nothing more, Debord goes further. The image is to Debord not juste un image but possesses an inherent beguiling power that petrifies and at the same time conveys and enhances a ceaseless boredom, a continual alienation. But it is also important that for Debord it is really not the image in itself that is criticised. It is not the tool in itself that alienates the worker. It is not the commodity in itself that alienates the consumer, but the prevailing ideology that functions as a beguilingly beautiful wrapping paper. Here we come close to how the image is draped as a consumable commodity, de facto without content.

Only the exchange value of the

pseudo-needs is interesting for the spectacle; the real usefulness, the service value, has had to completely give way to the image’s illusion of utility.

Debord writes in his magnum opus, the book The Society of the Spectacle from 1967, that ‘the real consumer has become a consumer of illusions.

The commodity is this materialised illusion, and the spectacle is its general expression.’

For the film to become an analytic and critical tool, Debord used the device of détournement, which one can claim is the most important contribution of the situationists to the art world (something that was of course not their intention!). Instead of making new art, one would thus now make use of already existing works. Bearing this in mind, a person who is well read in art history immediately thinks of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s artcritical works, such as the moustache on Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).

According to Debord, L.H.O.O.Q. is, however, not more interesting than the original painting, and, considering the hasty incorporation of Duchamp’s negations into the bourgeois art canon, their power as negation have also immediately decreased and they have instead become spectacular visual objects of consumption, forever museologically petrified. Literally speaking, détournement is a redirection of the substance within an object for the creation of a new context with a self-critical and subversive purpose.

To Debord détournement was less an artistic instrument than a purely

THE CONTEMPTUOUS DISHONESTY OF THE IMAGE - GUY DEBORD, SITUATIONISM, AND THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE · Lars Diurlin

political tool, such as when the paving of the streets of the city was redirected against the administrators of urbanism during the spring of revolt in 1968.

Nothing must congeal, neither being, nor creation, nor time.

What characterised situationism was a strictly upheld line against any kind of artistic productivity. This all but phobic fear of the spotlight, of objectification, of immobility, of canonisation, is a result of what the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács calls the phenomenon of reification. Here a relationship between static objects is created, commodities that are given a so-called ‘ghostly objectivity’. What is reified goes through an objectification, is fixed, and ends up outside the subjective living world, and constitutes what Debord called ‘the society of the spectacle’ in which society is transformed into a negation of life that has become visible. In simple terms, if one sees the spectacle on the one hand and real society on the other as a pair of opposites, then the former is a false homogenised representation of the latter, conveyed through images, that totally occupies humanity’s time and space – an image that has a monopoly on appearing, a flattering one-way communication that never receives an answer. The spectacle has divided the unity of the world into reality and image, but continually struggles to present a polished semblance of pure objectivity – that the ideology that has been embodied in the spectacle not only is the true one, but merely is.

Because the capitalist production of commodities has accumulated a surplus (which has been the situation in the Western world for a long time), it suddenly demands cooperation from the worker also outside the working time of the production sphere, through which the worker’s free time becomes consumption time, and together working time and consumption time thus form an uninterrupted occupation

of life. The more spare time you have, the more the spectacle will endeavour to occupy also this time through the creation of ‘needs’, resulting in empty consumption and pointless entertainment. Lukács also tackles how time is thus reified. Time to Debord becomes nothing other than commodity time in a consumable disguise. That is to say, time becomes a commodity and consequently a congealed image of being. The spectacle is thus capital of such a degree of accumulation that it becomes image.

From nothing and back again Here we begin to understand why the creation of images is such an incredibly problematic area for Debord. The empty white and black film frames of Hurlements en faveur de Sade are filled with conclusive signification, with far greater meaning than the dishonest superficiality of the spectacle. These negations would also recur in each and every one of Debord’s subsequent films, which constantly deprive us of the voyeuristic pleasures we have become accustomed to when we go to the cinema. ‘The audience never find what they are attracted by. They are attracted by what they actually find’, says Debord in his fifth film, Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film ‘La société du spectacle’ (1975). This claim works in all contexts where the commodity has been draped in the desirable packaging of the spectacle, but not however with respect to occasions when the viewer finds the image of nothing, just a non-consumable black hole, completely without any means of identification. Because we need these pleasures of the image. The more banal the spectacle makes work, everyday life, and our entire lived environment, the more this has to be compensated for by a consumption of images. We thus in the end consume a non-authentic image of ourselves,

in other words a stereotype, that functions as the spectacle’s veritable cast, modelled on the symbol of the ostensibly experienced: the celebrity, who according to Debord produces the unobtainable results of societal work by imitating the by-products that in some magic way have been placed as goals beyond work itself – power and leisure time. But in reality we only have stereotypes to choose from, more like unchangeable Happy Families-cards, drawn for life.

If one allows this vision of the human position in society to influence one, as Debord and the situationists did, then it cannot be denied that a certain hopelessness manifests itself. This melancholy feeling also echoes throughout all of Debord’s works. If one then contemplates the fact that there is no way out except for a total revolution of everyday life, something that we all deep inside know will never happen, then the situationist Raul Vaneigem’s resigned, almost suicidal words no longer jar as falsely as at a first reading: ‘A life built on passion can never be belittled. Such a life should rather be taken than allowed to quietly turn to dust’. Debord eventually committed suicide in 1994.

Nor did Debord ever come closer to total negation than in his first film. All of his subsequent works were merely futile attempts to give shape to the same negation, attempts that were in advance doomed to failure. Perhaps it was this resignation that led Debord to write his Mémoires already in 1958 – as though everything thereafter was simply a repetition of what had once been. One can see Debord’s entire oeuvre as one single circular movement, from nothing back to nothing, indicated in the palindrome of the title of Debord’s last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), and manifested in the final text of the same film: ‘To be gone through again.

From the beginning’.

9

TRUMP AND THE ‘SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE’ ROBERT ZARETSKY

Nearly 50 years ago, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” reached bookshelves in France. It was a thin book in a plain white cover, with an obscure publisher and an author who shunned interviews, but its impact was immediate and far-reaching, delivering a social critique that helped shape France’s student protests and disruptions of 1968.

“The Society of the Spectacle” is still relevant today. With its descriptions of human social life subsumed by technology and images, it is often cited as a prophecy of the dangers of the internet age now upon us.

And perhaps more than any other 20th-century philosophical work, it captures the profoundly odd moment we are now living through, under the presidential reign of Donald Trump.

As with the first lines from JeanJacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”) and Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”), Debord, an intellectual descendant of both of these thinkers, opens with political praxis couched in high drama: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

In the 220 theses that follow, Debord, a founding member of the avantgarde Situationist group, develops his indictment of “spectacular society.”

With this phrase, Debord did not simply

mean to damn the mass media. The spectacle was much more than what occupied the screen. Instead, Debord argued, everything that men and women once experienced directly — our ties to the natural and social worlds — was being mulched, masticated and made over into images. And the pixels had become the stuff of our very lives, in which we had relegated ourselves to the role of walk-ons.

The “image,” for Debord, carried the same economic and existential weight as the notion of “commodity” did for Marx. Like body snatchers, commodities and images have hijacked what we once naïvely called reality. The authentic nature of the products we make with our hands and the relationships we make with our words have been removed, replaced by their simulacra. Images have become so ubiquitous, Debord warned, that we no longer remember what it is we have lost. As one of his biographers, Andy Merrifield, elaborated, “Spectacular images make us want to forget — indeed, insist we should forget.”

But in Debord’s view, forgetting doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. We are not just innocent dupes or victims in this cataclysmic shift from being to appearing, he insisted. Rather, we reinforce this state of affairs when we lend our attention to the spectacle. The sun never sets, Debord dryly noted, “on the empire of modern passivity.”

And in this passive state, we surrender ourselves to the spectacle.

For Marx, alienation from labor was a defining trait of modernity. We are no longer, he announced, what we make. But even as we were alienated from our working lives, Marx assumed that we could still be ourselves outside of work. For Debord, though, the relentless pounding of images had pulverized even that haven. The consequences are both disastrous

Per-Olof Stoltz, Gualöv, 2000 10

TRUMP AND ‘THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE’ · ROBERT ZARETSKY

and innocuous. “There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them,” Debord concluded, “because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse.”

Public spaces, like the agora of Ancient Greece, no longer exist. But having grown as accustomed to the crushing presence of images as we have to the presence of earth’s gravity, we live our lives as if nothing has changed.

With the presidency of Donald Trump, the Debordian analysis of modern life resonates more deeply and darkly than perhaps even its creator thought possible, anticipating, in so many ways, the frantic and fantastical, nihilistic and numbing nature of our newly installed government. In Debord’s notions of “unanswerable lies,” when “truth has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to pure hypothesis,” and the “outlawing of history,” when knowledge of the past has been submerged under “the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same list of trivialities,” we find keys to the rise of trutherism as well as Trumpism.

In his later work, “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,” published almost 20 years after the original, Debord seemed to foresee the spectacular process that commenced on Jan. 20. “The spectacle proves its arguments,” he wrote, “simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed …. Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it likes, once or three times over, and change the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte.” After Trump’s inauguration, the actual size of the audience quickly ceased to matter.

The battle over images of the crowd, snapped from above or at ground

level, simply fueled our collective case of delirium tremens.

Since then, as each new day brings a new scandal, lie or outrage, it has become increasingly difficult to find our epistemological and ethical bearings: The spectacle swallows us all. It goes on, Debord observed, “to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists.

The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.” Indeed. Who among us recalls the many lies told

by Trump on the campaign trail? Who can re-experience the shock felt when first seeing or hearing the “Access Hollywood” tape? Who can separate the real Trump from the countless parodies of Trump and the real dangers from the mere idiocies? Who remembers the Russians when our own Customs and Border officials are coming for our visas?

In the end, Debord leaves us with disquieting questions. Whether we love Trump or hate him, is it possible we are all equally addicted consumers of spectacular images he continues to generate? Have we been complicit in the rise of Trump, if only by consuming the images generated by his person and politics? Do the critical counter-images that protesters create constitute true resistance, or are they instead collaborating with our fascination with spectacle? We may insist that this consumption is the basic work of concerned citizenship and moral vigilance. But Debord would counter that such consumption reflects little more than a deepening addiction.

We may follow the fact checkers and cite the critics to our hearts’ delight, but these activities, absorbed by the spectacle, have no impact on it.

Surely, the spectacle has continued nonstop since Jan. 20. While Debord, who committed suicide in 1994, despaired of finding a way to

institutionalize what, by nature, is resistant to institutionalization, we need not. We seem to be entering a period similar to May 1968, which represents what Debord called “lived time,” stripping back space and time from the realm of spectacle and returning it to the world of human interaction.

The unfolding of national protests and marches, and more important the return to local politics and community organizing, may well succeed where the anarchic spasms of 1968 failed, and shatter the spell of the spectacle.

Robert Zaretsky Robert Zaretsky specializes in French history when not teaching in The Human Situation. His books include Nîmes at War (Penn State University 1995), Cock and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue (Nebraska 2004), and with John Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding (Yale 2009). His most recent books are Albert Camus: Elements to a Life (Cornell 2010) and, with Alice Conklin and Sarah Fishman, France and its Empire Since 1870 (Oxford 2010). His book “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning” was published in 2013 by Harvard UP. His new book, “Boswell’s Enlightenment,” will be published

by Harvard in spring 2015, and he is also writing a book on the friendship between Catherine the Great of Russia and the French philosophe Denis Diderot. Zaretsky is also the history editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, regular columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward and frequent contributor to the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy and Chronicle of Higher Education. (Ph.D., University of Virginia) 11

UN-SPECTACLE THE SPECTACLE? PONTUS KYANDER

“In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 9.

The Society of the Spectacle is a 1967 book by Guy Debord, with a title as catching as its content is mostly neither read nor much considered. In that sense, it shares the fate of Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “The Media is the Message” – which was admittedly not a book title, as it appeared much before he published the tonguein-cheek sequel The Media is the Massage. We took to the phrase, not always knowing its actual meaning.

Debord’s book is a product of its time, sharing with its readers a punch of doctrinarian Marxism as well as a scent of burning rubber and tear gas from the barricades of Paris in the May revolt of 1968. We might think today, that the late 1960s was an age of ‘truth’, of direct action, of youthful rebellion against crumbling authority.

If so, it was a reaction against a post-WW2 society that had grown too complacent with itself and its achievements.

In this book organized as a series of 221 numbered paragraphs, there are quite a few catching formulations.

Guy Debord famously stated that a world of former unity and reality has been shattered by a world of spectacle, where a system of images is replacing reality and truth. Instead of truth or reality a world of more or less skillful deceptions presents itself. This is false consciousness, as the Marxist terminology goes. The 12

Society of the Spectacle is according to Debord not the images themselves, but the relationships between people “mediated by images”.

What Debord describes is a projection of an idealized society and its relationships between people and between these and consumer goods and even life styles, ideas and ideals as varieties of commodity. In this new world, all choices are already made without the consumers being made aware of it, the spectacle is as much the cause as it is own goal and end result. What I see before my closed eyes is a commercial in 1960s style, where the petty Bourgeois family lifestyle is appearing on both sides of a TV screen, like in Valie Export’s early television art work of 1971 Facing a Family, where the filmed image of a family eating by their TV table was broadcasted into the homes of people across Austria, assumingly sitting by their tables watching back.

The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.” The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.

The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 12.

The concepts of truth and falsehood is essential to Debord, often dressed in the Marxist terms of Consciousness and False Consciousness – to be precise, the latter is not used by Marx himself but by Engels, while it became increasingly central in Marxist discussions as the more doctrinarian 1970s kicked in. False consciousness is what the Bourgeois society serves its citizens, it was claimed. The problem with this terminology is that it refers both to a Romantic, even

Schopenhauer-tinted, idea of reality as hidden behind the veil of Maya, and to the positivist perception of truth as something definite and undivided, which can only be truly seen through a filter – another veil of Maya – called (Critical or Political) Consciousness, i.e.

Marxism.

Debord’s many claims are often catching, but also open to critique.

He speaks of a state of “directly lived” experience in a distant and idealized past as opposed to the society of spectacle. A Paradise, lost and never regained. It is hard to tell how and when this wonderful state of undisturbed innocence occurred and when it was wrecked. Philosophically, much of what Debord says about the spectacle is expressed with more precision and critical analysis by postmodern and only slightly later thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze in for instance their different ways of discussing simulation and simulacra.

The spectacle mediated currently through our computers and (still) TV screens might not at all copy the onedimensional world of TV advertising in the 1960s. In recent years politics have suddenly transformed into reality shows and prime time entertainment.

Whenever the TV is turned on, there seems to be yet another populist character, a sort of demagogue clown moved into politics, mesmerizing its audience with a combination of new truths based on what the audiences might want to hear and what is outrageous enough to hit every headline and talk show only moments later.

It is as if the Spectacle previously filmed through the soft cornered lenses of Debord’s has got an evil or cynical twist in recent time. What we see might be a commodity, but not one anyone necessarily wants to have at home.

We see a grotesque, twisted, rapid

UN-SPECTACLE THE SPECTACLE · PONTUS KYANDER

and entertaining turn of spectacles, and whether we sympathize or are disgusted by what we see, we know there will be even more, and worse, tomorrow.

“You are fired!” – was the penultimate phrase and situation of the reality show “The Apprentice” where verbal abuse, betrayal and manipulation were epitomized as the foundations of business as well as staff management.

We all know now that the feared and by some admired (and by others, among them people from business, ridiculed) center point of this show was the man to become the 45th and current President of the USA, Donald Trump.

Right now, at a moment when our attention span has – under the constant pressure of world events – shrunk to approximately a single day at the most, even an intellectually aware follower of daily news has difficulties engaging with painfully cynical events or statements and their consequences for a longer time than what is allowed in the tiny time-slot before the next outrageous event. In the case of Trump, it seems even to be a media strategy: once you are in trouble (again), do or say something even more heinous than the current issue, like dropping the biggest conventional bomb ever in some remote country, declaring a trade war with a dependent neighbour or a competing power, scrapping a trade agreement, insulting another political leader, or tying bonds with tyrants. Just grab the world yet again (metaphorically) by the pussy, then smash a window, insult a neighbour, befriend a mass murderer, fill your pockets as much as you can in plain sight or just tell another lie. As long as every move gets the same maximum attention as the previous, we will experience it all as a merry-go-round off its hinges, turning at a speed where

horror and hilarity can’t be told from each other.

This constant manipulation of the awareness of the environment, and the absolute opportunism in the approach to what can be said and done to cause your opponents the greatest and most immediate damage, does have deep historical roots. You can go to any intrigues and scandals of ancient China, Japan or Europe. You can go to the Medieval and Renaissance courts of Italy. You can go to Machiavelli.

“It is as if the Spectacle previously filmed through the soft cornered lenses of Debord’s has got an evil or cynical twist in recent time.”

Machiavelli’s The Prince is a book advising a member of the Medici family on how to best govern a state. The ends justify the means. The Prince maintains his power by inducing spite between his competitors and performs whatever necessary actions to stay in power. Machiavelli introduced to political theory an emphasis on realism as opposed to the idealism characterizing earlier “Mirrors for Princes”. Above all he introduced a theory and practice that was deliberate and calculated to achieve distinctive goals.

What we see in the Trump post-truth reign is power as its own ends and means. It does not add glory to the Prince or strengthen the State. Even if what is acted out looks cynical, it is hard to tell the actual goals of this new Prince, and how it is supposed to be in the interest of his State. It could be argued that what the reality show billionaire-turned-president displays is a pre-Machiavellian ruler, who aims basically to fill his own plate and pockets, rather than creating a sustainable state or a great reputation for himself. It is an unruly ruler, making public what Machiavelli would have advised to do secretly.

You see squabbling courtiers and parliamentarians, but you also see the man in power increasingly isolating himself in his gilded cage and tower.

Maybe the French election is a turning point, leaving the left leaning liberal Emanuel Macron victorious after a battle with the far right populist Marine Le Pen that kept the European continent on its toes. We didn’t see yet another pile of mischievous, xenophobic dirt shoved into the gaping mouths of a majority eager to be fed just faintly perfumed garbage. Despite the polarization, which normally supports a flight to the extremes, a voice of moderation won solidly. This has never happened before in France, where conservative rightwing and socialist presidents have taken turns at the helm of the country. Some see this with regret. I rejoice.

So, we’ve seen spectacle. Is there a return to slow, unspectacular politics, politics that somehow even agrees with a few idealized goals as well as means? To the big and beautiful words of common good, of openness, generosity, education and moderation?

To Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. If so, farewell to the Society of the Spectacle. Welcome, unspectacular future.

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MALMÖ FOTOBIENNAL PRESENTS NATHALIE DAOUST SUBJEKTIV OMAR VICTOR DIOP

Together with Malmö Konsthall , Kulturen (Lund) and Fotogalleri Vasli Souza, Malmö Fotobiennal 2017 has the honour to present three exhibitions for this year’s biennale with acclaimed artists and group of curators: Nathalie Daoust, Objektiv and Omar Victor Diop.

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KOREAN DREAMS

NATHALIE DAOUST FOTOGALLERI VASLI SOUZA

Photographer Nathalie Daoust’s newest project, Korean Dreams, is a complex series that probes the mysterious world of North Korea. Her images reveal a country that seems to exist outside of time, as a carefully choreographed mirage. Daoust has spent much of her career exploring the chimeric world of fantasy: the hidden desires and urges that compel people to dream, to dress up, to move beyond the bounds of convention. With Korean Dreams she is exploring this escapist impulse not as an individual choice, but as a way of life forced upon an entire nation.

Korean Dreams is the product of Daoust’s tour of North Korea in 2012. Shrouded by its fanatical isolationism, most foreigners associate the nation only with the hallmarks of its repressive regime – kidnapping, torture and forced labor camps. Tourist experiences are carefully crafted to countermand these impressions. Accompanied by guides at all times, and adhering to the rigid, pre-approved travel program, visitors get a highly selective view of the country as they are paraded past cultural landmarks such as theaters, schools and music halls, meant to create the illusion of a perfect society. Intrigued by the immiscible nature of these two North Koreas, one an imaginary, fantastical world and the other filled with poverty and an inescapable military presence, Daoust decided to focus on the liminal spaces that exist between the two.

In practice, the desire to capture this hidden space required ingenuity, and was not without risk.

North Korean guides censor tourist photographs, permitting only select subjects shot in specified formats: for example, statues of Kim Jong Il must be photographed in their entirety – digital pictures are perused so that guards can delete images that crop his head, or legs – and photographs of military personnel are strictly forbidden. In order to circumvent these restrictions, Daoust tied a release cable to her arm, enabling her to take pictures without touching the camera as it hung from her neck. By shooting furtively while traveling among

sanctioned destinations she was able to capture an alternate narrative, one that exists between the invented world and the actual. The choice of photographic method also aided her escape from the guard’s censorship: using an analog camera not only made immediate review of her images impossible, but according to the artist the guards seemed to think that because her technology was outdated her photographs posed less of a threat.

Loss of reality, loss of personal identity, and loss of country are all apparent in her dissolving shapes.

The intricate development process is something of a hallmark for Daoust, who considers the tangible manipulation of film to be a key element of her artistic objective. When describing her procedure she has stated that she “uses and misuses traditional tools, experimenting to discover new techniques to push the limits of traditional photography and find ‘light’ within a world of shapes, textures, colors and shadows.” Past examples include the use of orthochromatic film, Lenticular technology, and encasing prints shot on expired Chinese film in an amber-like resin. The differing aesthetics accorded by these distinctive methods enable Daoust to create unique realities for each subject, layering dreamworld upon dreamworld as she explores human behavior.

Korean Dreams is a seemingly natural evolution for Daoust. Here, she has expanded her vision, moving her gaze from the individual to the group, while bringing together the disparate themes that run through the corpus of her work. Escapism is a foundational theme for Daoust, as is apparent in past projects: in Impersonating Mao the act of assuming another’s identity is foremost an act of mental escape; Tokyo Hotel Story is a series of portraits of Japanese dominatrices in their work environment, and Street Kiss, Brazil focuses on prostitutes in a Brazilian brothel, both are places where people go to escape, and her subjects are those who are paid to be conduits of fantasy. These projects investigate the fundamental human need to break free of present reality, to find the means of entering a world different from our own.

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Nathalie Daoust Kim Jong-Il 2015 16

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Nathalie Daoust Kim Il-Sung Square Kim Il-Sung Square is a central focal point in Pyongyang for frequent rallies, dances and military parades. Similar in design and func on to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the square measures 75,000 square metres and can hold up to 100,000 people. Portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-Il are displayed on buildings surrounding the square where portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin once stood.

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Nathalie Daoust Schooling Education is universal and state-funded.

According to the CIA North Korea has a 100% literacy rate and students have to complete a three-year, 81-hour course on Kim Jong-un. Note: In the 1990s all teachers were required to pass an accordion test before being able to receive their teaching certificate.

What seems to propel Daoust is a fascination with moments of impact – those flashes when internal fantasy strikes external reality. Her photographs capture and mediate this collision, approaching the fundamental human need to escape the present and find the means of entering a world different from our own. But whereas in Tokyo Hotel Story and Street Kiss, Brazil, both consumer and provider are equal participants in the construction of fantasy, Daoust’s subjects in North Korea, while passively participating in the fantasy, were not complicit in its creation.

Her darkroom method also mimics the way information is transferred in North Korea – the photographs, as the North Korea people, are both manipulated until the underlying truth is all but a blur. Exposing the fallacy of the North Korean experience, and playing with the line between fiction and reality, Daoust exposes an indeterminate space where ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ are interchangeable.

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Nathalie Daoust Health Care In 1947, free healthcare was introduced for all citizens in North Korea, but the system collapsed in the late eighties. Many hospitals operate without electricity or heat and all parents have to buy their own medicines. While visiting a hospital we were told that no handicap children were born in North Korea since the 1950’s due to their strong genes. Note: A North Korean doctor who defected, Ri Kwang-chol, has claimed that babies born with physical defects are rapidly put to death and buried.

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SUBJEKTIV Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen, Basma Alsharif, Sara Cwynar, Liz Magic Laser, Deana Lawson, Zoe Leonard, Sandra Mujinga and Josephine Pryde MALMÖ KONSTHALL The exhibition Subjektiv is curated by the editorial board of the Scandinavian art journal Objektiv. Its fulcrum is the potential relations between art, politics and subjectivity in a time when the basis of democratic subjecthood is called into question. It brings together artworks from the last few years that speak to the current political situation through their strategic staging of subjectivity and its political potential or impotence. In this context, the usual title of the journal simply wouldn’t do, hence our temporary rebranding as Subjektiv.

The nine artists’ works are camera-based – photographs and films, installations, collages, and a poster project – and range from straight documentary to a post-internet aesthetic of the interface. While radically different in strategies and aesthetics, the artists all investigate the friction between the subjective, the collective, and the political.

While there is a sense that the shared public space of politics is being overwhelmed by affective content, we are simultaneously witnessing a reinvigoration of the power of the collective and the resolve of community. The exhibition and accompanying journal issues explore questions of what subjektiv might mean in this context. How do we apportion our attention when our media feeds include traditional journalism, Internet gossip, propaganda, and the opinions of friends and family? What’s at stake when subjective criteria and utterances have entered the political environment at a completely new scale?

These questions connect in fundamental ways with our understanding of the camera as a subjective narrator and a technology of perception both in the history of photography and in today’s realm of the scroll. While some works questions how personhood is defined, negotiated, and legislated through photographic representation, others reflect on the discrepancy between physically grounded and immaterial ways of existing as humans, and on how deeply embedded we are in other life networks and ecologies. The self is no longer necessarily understood as singular; we acknowledge the extension and molding of subjectivity via screens and technologies and via a myriad of practices; consuming,

branding, naming, performing, liking, hosting, acting, and mimicking.

Sandra Mujinga (NO) reflects upon what she terms the polybody in her investigations of the digital self. Sara Cwynar (CA) explores the finely tuned shaping of subjectivity through the circulation and valuation of objects and images, often addressing feminist issues and what she calls a soft misogyny. Deana Lawson (US) creates multifaceted representations of black iconography, describing her work as negotiating knowledge of selfhood through a corporeal dimension. The collage project ALBUM by Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen (NO) offers a highly subjective take on photographic representations of gender, sex and the concept of care. Liz Magic Laser (US) uses the format of the TED Talk in a film installation featuring a ten-year-old actor delivering a monologue adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. In this way, her work relates the author’s attack on the socialist ideal of enlightened self-interest to contemporary capitalist thinking. Another film installation

by Basma Alsharif (US) addresses both the stateless self and mass-mediated representations of trauma at the Gaza Strip. Zoe Leonard (US) addresses displacement and statelessness as both an individual experience and a shared social condition. Josephine Pryde (UK) speaks of another form of displacement in her series It’s Not My Body, which superimposes found, low-resolution MRI scans of a human embryo in the womb against desert landscapes shot through tinted fil-ters. She engages multiple definitions of “reproduction” and their impact on political debates about subjecthood and a woman’s right to choose.

Zoe Leonard’s iconic queer-feminist text I Want a President will function as the exhibition’s point of departure. Written in 1992, the text poignantly portrays the cultural and political climate in New York during that time. Twenty-five years later, the current political climate in Europe and North America has generated renewed attention for Leonard’s text.

Taken together, the artworks in Subjektiv call for recognition of a multi-faceted political subject at a charged historical Continue on page 25

Sandra Mujinga Humans On The Other Hand, Lied Easily and Often (1-3) 2016 22

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Sara Cwynar Armor (Sebastian Schmid, Harnash, 1550–60 Kat. Nr. 139), 2017 24

Zoe Leonard Untitled, 2015/16. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

moment. The exhibition also reflects upon how photographs continue to create subjectivities and inform the relationship of public to private life.

Subjektiv; one features solo presentations of the artists’ work and words, the other presents recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake.

Subjektiv is made through a collaborative, and inherently subjective, dialogue between five curators. The exhibition is a collaboration with Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, where it will be presented this autumn. It will be accompanied by a two-part issue of the journal Objektiv, temporarily renamed

Objektiv’s editorial board/curatorial team consists of: Lucas Blalock (artist, US), Ida Kierulf (curator, NO), Brian Sholis (writer/curator/director, CA), Susanne Ø. Sæther (researcher and curator, NO), and Nina Strand (artist and editor in chief, Objektiv, NO).

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Basma Alsharif Comfortable in our new homes Film still 2017 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès

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Josephine Pryde It’s Not My Body, III 2011 Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

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Josephine Pryde It’s Not My Body, VII 2011 Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery

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THE STUDIO OF VANITIES OMAR VICTOR DIOP KULTUREN LUND

”Working with portraits forces us to think about the future.”

the portraits, Omar Victor Diop wishes to convey different emotions while at the same time placing the pictures in a historical context.

Omar Victor Diop’s work depicts the diversity of societies and lifestyles that characterize Africa today and questions whether we can speak of a homogeneous “Africa”. He focuses on people’s different backgrounds and their pursuit of realizing their personal dreams – without any limitations.

All the photographs in the exhibition were staged in collaboration with those depicted. The intention is to show how complex people are. The portrayed all work in the creative field, for example as designers, musicians, actors, fashion designers. In the pictures we meet the urban culture emerging in Africa’s countries right now. Omar Victor Diop sees Africa as a concept – an abstract mental construction – somewhere between dreams and visions. That’s where possibilities can be found.

Omar Victor Diop was born in 1980 in Dakar, Senegal, where he also lives and works. After studying in Paris and while having a brilliant career as a business consultant in Senegal, he entered a series of photos concerning sustainable fashion, in a photo biennale in 2011. The series “Fashion 2112 – The Future of Beauty” was accepted, and since then he has achieved great success with his different projects. Omar Victor Diop is a photobased artist working with fine-art photography as well as with fashion, advertising and portrait photography. The Studio of Vanities series refers directly to photographic history, to well-known names such as Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe from Mali and Mama Casset from Senegal.

The textiles used as backdrops have been collected

by Omar Victor Diop’s family for generations. The different fabrics all have their own history and each was specially selected for the portrayed individual. By using the textiles as backdrops in

Omar Victor Diop’s works have been seen in exhibitions in Dakar, Arles, Panama City, Los Angeles, Malaga and Paris. He is represented by the Magnin-A gallery in Paris.

Omar Victor Diop Thierno Ndiaye Model, Fashion Designer, Actor

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Omar Victor Diop Joel Adama Gueye Singer, Composer, Model

Omar Victor Diop Ken Aïcha Sy Blogger, Music Label Owner 33

Omar Victor Diop Aïcha Dème Cultural Columnist 2011

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Omar Victor Diop Oumy Journalist 2012

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MALMÖ’S BURNING CLEMENTS ALTGÅRD (CURATOR) MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ

In the early 1980s, just before the redevelopment of the city started in earnest and the economy took off, Malmö could still feel like a rather bleak place. People who lived through that time will recall the many “bomb craters”—the vacant lots left by tearing down old buildings—and the provisional barracks around the Triangeln plaza during the 1970s and early 80s. The city’s flat terrain and broad streets were swept by the strong prevailing winds, and when it rained those vacant lots awaiting construction turned to mud. I remember a walk through muddy fields in the heart of the city one New Year’s Eve in the 36

1980s. Fireworks exploded all around me, and for a moment it felt exactly like a war zone. That was part of growing up in Malmö.

Malmö is not a particularly easy city to portray. One of the literary portraits that were read in our circles was Jacques Werup’s deeply personal and colorful book Hometown, which came out in 1981. It ended with a bitter, despairing epilogue in which the author finds some words scrawled across the wall of a building on the edge of the Gamla Väster neighborhood. They say, “A city of demolished buildings—a city without

memories.”

Development in the city, according to Werup, seemed to be headed toward a kind of uniformity and anonymity.

A lot has happened since that time in Malmö, and today the city is associated with anything but uniformity.

But those of us who were young here in the early 80s weren’t nearly as worried about the city’s direction as Werup was.

Several years ago we, Clemens Altgård and Ola Åstrand, began to discuss the idea of producing an art exhibition about, among other things,

the city of Malmö as we knew it in our youth. In conversations with John Peter Nilsson (Moderna Museet Malmö’s director 2012–16) we developed plans for an exhibition that would span from the 1960s to the 1980s.

That planning effort turned out to be a long process due to a number of different circumstances. In 2013 we began reaching out and initiating a number of parallel conversations with potential contributing artists. Those conversations continued, and have now finally culminated in the exhibition Malmö’s Burning: An Exhibition about Revolt, Dreams, and Passions, 1968–1988. Those years are not a strict delineation of when the works in the show were executed, but rather a symbolic construct that has served as a temporal framework for us to relate to, and sometimes as a boundary for us to cross.

The bearing idea for Malmö’s Burning is to be an exhibition that offers a new and different picture of the city and what has happened there in terms of its cultural history and even sociological aspects. We have assembled a mixture of art in the conventional sense with a variety of expressions for the subcultures that have left an impression on the city.

We have also been influenced by Lia Ghilardi, an international expert in urban cultural planning who believes that most western cities, in competing with one another to be the most attractive place, have often missed what’s most essential. It is ironic that most cities promote themselves using either attributes that are borrowed like stencils, in the form of culture prestige objects like world-famous musicals, or obvious tourist brochure clichés.

According to Ghilardi, it is actually the subcultures and minority groups that give a city its dynamism. We are inclined to agree with her.

city, trying to reflect our subjective experiences of Malmö, redux seemed to fit perfectly. The sound of the word also recalls remix, and it was also our intention to produce a kind of remix of cultural historical elements. And that is what we’ve done, even though we decided to stick with the original title Malmö’s Burning. So this redux and remix approach has guided our thinking throughout. Both of us have found some inspiration in the British author Jeff Noon’s novel Needle in the Groove (1999). The book’s narrator is a musician, and joins a group that tries to develop music with the help of a new tool—a sphere filled with a liquid drug that allows the protagonists to travel back in time to bygone musical venues. Manchester is the center of the action, and in Noon’s imaginative interpretation the dreary and dilapidated city is transformed into a stage for a peculiar drama. The author mixes lyrical prose passages with samples and an advanced editing technique that leads to thoughts of a literary master from an earlier era, William S. Burroughs. Noon’s writing is saturated with rhythms, resonance, and references to popular culture in Britain. Contrary to what one might expect, all of this results in a distinctly personal book whose form thoroughly illuminates the content rather than becoming an end in itself. For example, Noon recreates the last night of Manchester’s legendary punk club the Electric Circus—a night that repeats itself in several different versions over the course of the book. But which version is the right one, the truth?

Surprisingly enough, there is a linear story inside Noon’s experimental

prose, and the coherence of the plot becomes increasingly clear the more we read. We hope the coherence of Malmö’s Burning is gradually revealed to viewers in the same way.

We should note that we are not the first to use the title Malmö’s Burning.

It was also given to a large-format multiple-artist exhibition arranged by the Drömmarnas Hus cultural center in the Rosengård neighborhood in 2005, and it’s still a controversial title—so loaded and provocative, in fact, that we needed to think long and hard before deciding to use it.

There’s definitely something unsettling about it, even ominous. And maybe that suits the demonic narrative about Malmö a little too well—a narrative that lately has begun to spread not just throughout Sweden but abroad, even reiterated by the tweeting President of the United States. My response is that fire itself is a polysemantic, ambiguous metaphor, a fact the Drömmarnas Hus exhibition played on too. The point of departure for their production is the argument that “either Malmö is going to burn to the ground or else there’s a lot of incendiary power in Malmö,” and the show made a convincing case for the latter. We want to show that these incendiary forces have been smoldering in Malmö for some time, and make the connection between the fire we see today and the events of the past. Malmö did not in fact burn to the ground in 2005, but twelve years later we are still accustomed to recurring street crime and gun violence, fires we can’t ignore. At the same time it’s extremely important to provide a nuanced picture of the city, and to convey that there are and always have

The concept of not doing a conventional art historical and linear exhibition, and of not basing it on established and customary values, emerged gradually. At one point we even changed the working title to Malmö Redux. The word redux comes originally from Latin, is fairly common in English, and has been used in film contexts in Sweden. It means restored, or returned, but in everyday speech it can mean to do over and experience anew. Because we were hunting for a vanished 37

been strong positive forces here as well.

There is another way of interpreting the word burning. The word was just as charged when the British punk band The Clash sang “London’s burning…” in the late 1970s, but they were referring to a smoldering discontent: “…with boredom now.” The song also includes the lines “The wind howls through the empty blocks looking for a home / I run through the empty stone because I’m all alone.” Those words were easy for a young kid in Malmö to relate to in the late 70s. And that wind is something all of us, young and old alike, deal with to this day. Thus we have thought less about burning cars and more about how an inner spark can be ignited even in the most dreary or windbuffeted places, whether in protest or with the realization that something needs to be done, and that we are going to have to do it ourselves. In fact, it’s probably true that boredom leads to creativity. And I sometimes wonder if that no longer applies to kids today, since they always have access to stimulation in the form of digital entertainment. But perhaps that screen-time overload can lead to a new kind of boredom that in turn leads to a new kind of creative expression.

I wouldn’t rule it out. It’s a fact that today’s Malmö has been home to a long series of business successes in the field of computer games and digital production, which depend on young people with innovative ideas.

What’s more, the city’s leaders show much more willingness today than ever before to support new forms of cultural expression, and that ambition has generated a lively cultural scene with music, experimental theater, artist-driven galleries, and more. The era our exhibition examines was still burdened by the need to clearly distinguish between high culture and popular culture, and in general the conditions in society were more openly hierarchical and patriarchal than today. Anyone with new or different ideas often had to arrange and run their innovative project on their own, whether it was starting a band or organizing more or less informal events and exhibitions.

When Ola Åstrand and Ulf Kihlander together produced the 1998 exhibition The Heart Is on the Left: Swedish Art 1964–1974 at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, it was the first major 38

retrospective of Swedish art from the 1960s and 70s. In writing an article for the exhibition catalogue I was reminded what a wealth of imagery emerged during that period. There were actually several different revolutions going on at once. Alongside the leftist political wave came the more apolitical hippie movement, which formed part of the youth revolt. Mind-expanding psychedelic drugs played a central role in hippie culture, of course, but there were other essential attributes.

For example, there was a strong faith in collective action, communalism, and non-hierarchical forms of organization.

Freedom and love was their primary message for the surrounding world.

In the early 1970s Malmö suffered from a serious shortage of musical venues, and in response some people with ties to the alternative left and the music scene started the Folk Festival in 1971. One of them was Lasse Hejll, who has become known primarily for his art posters, but also worked as a photographer. He made a poster for a multi-activity evening at Malmö Museum in 1971. The event had been given the name “The Museum’s Burning!” and in Hejll’s screen print Mona Lisa smiles at the viewer.

In our exhibition we’re showing some of Hejll’s more seldom viewed satirical posters, which were a protest against the cultural politics of the city’s leaders at the time. They featured

photos from the Folk Festival that so effectively united people in a spirit of radicalism during a time when much was made of the distinction between high culture and popular culture. Ola Åstrand recalls the Folk Festival as a manifestation of the possibility of an alternative future, and how people who wanted to improve the world gathered together, sustained by faith in the future. He remembers as well the lack of advertising, the Mother Earth Collective’s vegetarian food, and how the sounds from the stage were borne aloft by the wind.

That brings to mind the prematurely passed British critic Mark Fisher, author of the book Capitalist Realism (2009), and his ideas about French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book Specters of Marx (1993). Derrida asserts that “time is out of joint,” referring to the state of things after “the end of history,” but he also writes about how the past comes back like a plague on the present. Fisher finds examples of such plagues in contemporary music.

He sees things like the obsession with vinyl discs and the eclectic recycling of older musical styles as expressions for a melancholic and yet vital longing for “lost futures.”

In the anthology Post Punk Then and Now (2016), Fisher expresses the idea that we are also plagued today by the political left’s inability to channel and make something of the resistance and the energies that have found expression in musical culture. In the same way, perhaps Malmö’s Burning could be seen as a kind of plague.

It also makes me wonder about how the populist right has been able in recent years to appropriate the word “alternative,” as in “alt right.”

When I look today at collections of works from the era of the first youth revolts, I am struck by the thought that it is primarily in times of upheaval that creative individuals on the margins of society are allowed into the public realm, when established values are being overturned with Carnival abandon. The hierarchical order is reestablished soon enough, and it is typical that several of the most interesting visual artists of the 1960s and 70s had already been lost to public memory just a couple of decades later. That was the case with the artist couple Sture and Charlotte Johannesson. But it changed with

Sture’s contribution to The Heart Is on the Left and Charlotte’s contribution to Light the Darkness!, an exhibition about the Cold War of the 1980s that followed it, both curated by Åstrand and Kihlander. In our younger days, Ola Åstrand and I got to know the Johannessons, who were among Malmö’s hippie pioneers. In the early 1980s they also emerged as digital trailblazers. They were open to other new influences of the day as well, including punk. I remember them complaining about old friends who had turned their backs on them—not for their interest in punk but because they worked with computers. The time was not yet ripe for the digital revolution, but the seed had been planted….

In Malmö’s Burning we do have something reminiscent of a computer, but the piece is more of a science fiction fantasy of a digital future. I’m thinking of Jacques Zadig’s The Wall.

He first got the idea for the work back in the fall of 1968, but did not complete it until 1976. Zadig gives form to something of the terror of Big Brother and the surveillance society of George Orwell’s 1984, a book that was familiar to many of us. Most citizens today take the personal computer for granted, along with their smartphone and even the tablet, but at the same time the surveillance society has become such an integral part of everyday life that many no longer think about digital

surveillance at all. Back then there was no social media or email. Distant communication was achieved through telephone landlines or with letters and postcards. In the late 1980s the fax was still commonly used. The Leger brothers ran a gallery in Malmö at the time, and they’ve told me that many works of art were sold via fax during the art boom that occurred in the final years of the decade. Then in 1990 Sweden was struck by a bank, finance, and property crisis that lasted for four bitter years—but that’s another story.

We should also say something about how this exhibition reflects the last decades before the world started being digitalized at an increasing pace. It was a time when it was still quite unusual for artists to use digital tools, even if an increasing number had begun to do so, especially the teenagers. It was also the time before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of “the end of history,” and before the processes of globalization and digitalization really took off. We know now that it wouldn’t be long before history found a new life and the world was rocked by new conflicts and war.

But globalization and digitalization have changed the conditions for daily life, and thus the analog world— for those of us who were around to experience it—has become a lost world that lives on only in our

memories and dreams.

Speaking of memories and history, though, it has not been our intention to make this some kind of nostalgic exposé. Instead of simply reiterating a story that has already been told, we have striven to assemble an alternative view of that story that embraces diversity and the margins of society. That also explains why—in case anyone’s wondering—certain works and artists that one might expect to see as a matter of course have not been included in this exhibition.

Therefore, having begun with our own memories and social networks, we have searched for artistic works that are unusual and locally unique, highlighting those that are important to us, while at the same time making a subjective inventory of a particular period in time. Some viewers will thus recognize a few pieces while others, particularly those who didn’t live through the era, will hopefully discover something they’ve never seen before.

Furthermore we would like to illuminate some common threads that run back and forth through time and space. One era transitions into another. Social ties are formed and dissolved—and then in some cases formed again years later. So instead of a history lesson, this has become a process by which different times collide as in a dream. And we have 39

also wanted to include some real dreamers in the show, like Annika Wide and Elisa Halvegård, two artists with roots in the 1960s’ more romantic tendencies each of whom in her own way seems to have been working with dreams since their youth. Wide has done it more explicitly, analyzing her own dreams and manifesting them in paintings or objects. This establishes a kind of interlinking between dream and art. Looking back on that time, Wide recalls, “In the 1970s and 80s I was painting my dreams so intensively that I could interpret them while I was still asleep!”

When asked to name her sources of inspiration, Elisa Halvegård said, “I admire and am inspired by John Bauer, Ernst Fuchs, William Morris, Edward Gorey, Anna Casparsson, Aubrey Beardsley, Hieronymus Bosch, and some of my contemporaries like Annika Wide. I’ll never forget her detailed early paintings from the Scania County Collection at the Malmö Museum.”

But it has also been our intention to incorporate art with a political content, like works by the artist Allan Friis, for example, whose interest in social issues intensified during the 1960s.

His pictures took on an increasingly political and social critical character in the early 70s. Thus the overall title for his portion of the exhibition is The Aesthetics of Resistance. The works we’ve included are from the 1970s, but the resistance they portray is in fact timeless.

We grew up during a time characterized by progressive rock and hippie culture, but were eventually drawn to punk and what has come to be called post-punk. Punk was actually an incitement, a counterpart in a way to Dadaism’s “zero point,” while post-punk sought new and sometimes experimental ways. But during the 1970s no one was making a distinction between the two. Post-punk is a term that emerged long after, when enough time had passed to reveal the difference.

I keep coming back to one book in particular about Malmö: Niklas Qvarnström’s book of essays Memento Malmö, which was published in 2001 by a little house called No Fun. Qvarnström portrays a city that can seem like a dream game, always slipping away from us even 40

as it reveals a number of precisely rendered details. He writes that Malmö is a kind of passage that isn’t really in Sweden, and explains the title Memento Malmö thus: “It is not the fatalistic ‘What are you gonna do?” or the isolation and desolation of northern Sweden, but rather an awareness that anything at all can happen, but that nine times out of ten it doesn’t happen, that the world is lying there a stone’s throw away, but mostly like a reminder of which side of the world you’re on, a Memento Malmö.”

Malmö as a passage. Malmö as a border zone. Malmö can be perceived as either a big city or a small town depending on your perspective and your points of reference. In social terms it is more of a small and closeknit community, one that offers more opportunity for different subcultures to mix and for meetings across boundaries and barriers. In that way Malmö may be seen as a kind of gray area—in a positive sense.

Punk was decidedly more disillusioned and individualistic than progressive rock, but they shared a common doit-yourself approach. That approach created a kind of collective selfconfidence that resulted in cultural expressions that can be appreciated for their originality even today, and in Malmö the hippies, progressive rockers, punkers, and post-punkers mixed with the artists and poets in meeting places throughout the city.

Thus, for example, conceptual artist Leif Eriksson could be found in a bar full of subcultural elements, lecturing informally to rock musicians about idea-based art.

It also generated some unusual cultural expressions. For example, several of the local punk bands (which we would today call post-punk bands) had a distinctive style that incorporated elements of psychedelic rock. One of the artists from this era, Stry, coined the term psynk to denote the psych-punk amalgam he considered a genre of its own. Stry plays a central role in Lena Mattson’s video piece When Hades Bursts with Blooms, which she produced just for Malmö’s Burning. I even appear in the piece as a representative for Malmöligan (The Malmö League), a group of local poets. Another member of the group was Per Linde, who has contributed a text/sound piece called

Malmö, a poem performed by the psychedelic rock band Technicolor Poets, which is currently active on the local music scene.

Ola Åstrand played in a series of local bands, and his retrospective piece The Ghetto is a search through the years of his youth in Malmö to explore the connections between things and his own identity during that era.

Both punk and progressive rock inspired grassroots creativity, a kind of joyful amateurism if you will. That was true not just in music, but in creative expression generally. And here we can see the connection to a slogan that was borrowed from Lautréamont and used by the Situationists in Paris during the social unrest of May 1968: “Poetry must be made by all!” In Malmö you could have said during that era, “Punk must be made by all!” Nevertheless it was an environment that I remember as profoundly male-dominated, a problem worth reflecting on today. We have chosen to make space here for a series of women artists who were punk rockers at the time: Jessica Nilsson, Maria Tomczak, Pernilla Frykholm, Ninni Benediktsson, and Anne Nummila Rosengren. Frykholm’s works are based on the 1970s, but they communicate consciously with the here and now through titles that celebrate rap artists of today, Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité and Joy Mbatha.

Christian Cavallin had his breakthrough as an artist in the late 1980s, but here he shows photographs he took a decade earlier of various punk stages, frequently in Great Britain, where he often traveled.

Cavallin says, “The pictures are what they are, but the music itself—the atmosphere, the mayhem and the magic—I couldn’t have captured it if I hadn’t been participating in it myself.

Taking pictures was secondary.

Several of them are taken from behind the band, looking out toward the audience, which I considered a very important component—the crush of the fans. I tried to bring that out. As a fan myself I was one of them, part of the horde.” This is also an example of how some individuals’ joy of traveling brought new experiences and ideas that later spread through their own hometown. If not for all these trips to other cities, Malmö would probably never have enjoyed such a vibrant subcultural scene. Of course the

proximity to places like Copenhagen and Berlin has also been important in this regard.

When creativity happens at the grassroots level, it often produces a kind of outsider art—work that doesn’t look like what you find in the established galleries but is art nonetheless. Now there are those who strongly object to the expression “outsider art,” and there are a number of arguments for why it’s not a good term. But this is not the place for that discussion. Since I do in fact use it here, I will rely on the Chicago author William Swislow, one of our most eloquent proponents of outsider art. Swislow offers a clear definition: the person behind the work must have created it without concern for established conceptions of what art is.

Nor can an outsider artist be motivated by a desire for commercial success or recognition from the art establishment.

Swislow talks about individuals who are driven by creative force but lack formal training in the field of art, and therefore don’t even see themselves as artists—at least until some expert tells them that what they’re doing can actually be considered art. Do we have any such pieces in Malmö’s Burning? Well that’s something for those of you visiting the exhibition to think about! In one case the outsider perspective is plainly expressed: Isabel Rayo Planella doesn’t want to call herself an artist even if we who have curated the exhibition consider what she makes to be art. Her spatial installation Souvenir is a kind of staging of the home environment she created over the years by assembling a multitude of objects and images in an enormous, changeable bricolage.

It should also be noted that Rayo Planella has been very active in Malmö’s cultural scene, contributing to films and posing as one of the country’s best-known life drawing models. She came to Sweden from Chile in the 1970s, and is an example of how Latin American immigrants have brought new impulses to the city.

Another artist, Pepe Viñoles, fled from Uruguay to Chile in 1972, and after the 1973 coup d’état in that country came to Sweden. For several years he worked mostly with making posters, which often had a political message. In the 1980s he came to Malmö, and he has contributed a new piece to our exhibition entitled Remnants, a reflection on the time

that has passed and on his career as a poster artist.

Abelardo Gonzalez is an artist and architect who immigrated to Sweden from Argentina in 1978. He quickly made a name for himself in Malmö. He left a strong impression as a designer, with an innovative interior featuring mirrors and zebra hides that was a hit for Club Trocadero when it opened in 1979. It became a queer meeting place where everyone was welcome.

He has produced a new video piece for our exhibition that offers a look back at Trocadero’s heyday and at an era when public life in Malmö was becoming a little more open than before.

Malmö evolved gradually and became in time less of an industrial city. The photographer and filmmaker Paulina Hårleman moved here in 1985. She brought with her experiences from Paris and from stays in cities such as Milan, London, and Munich. In Malmö she found a lively art scene with new magazines such as Nöjesguiden and Reflektion. She built up a company here together with her life partner, Roger Hynne, that came to work with photography, journalism, film, music, and events. For Malmö’s Burning Hårleman has put together a slideshow she calls Adu, lugna ner daj tösabid (roughly, “Hey now, easy does it, little girl”), a comment someone directed at her in the local dialect as she wandered around Malmö taking photographs. Some viewers will probably recognize some of the people in the pictures. For example, the conceptual artist Leif Eriksson appears in a couple of them, as does Kristian Lundberg, who was a member of the group of poets known as the

Malmö League.

The late 1980s is also represented in Malmö’s Burning by the artist and set designer Åke Dahlbom, also known as Art Bomba. He designed the sets for Darling Desperados, a theater troupe he helped found in Malmö in 1987. His piece Funeralism: Impressions of a Vanished Future comprises several parts that together form a picture of interdisciplinary expression characterized by spontaneity and expressivity. During this time, Stina Ebers was a central figure in the wave of new art that was being shown in Malmö galleries. Her sculptures and installations attracted attention for being so uncompromisingly executed.

In 1973 she participated in a group exhibition at Galleri Lång, and in 1986 she had a solo show at Galleri TV, which was at the time an important meeting place in the new cultural environment emerging in the city.

These were followed by a series of exhibitions in Stockholm as well as in Germany.

Explicitly political art was not particularly sought after in the late 1980s, but it later made a comeback beyond and outside of the point in time where our exhibition ends. But as I said, our time frame is mostly symbolic. The present moment figures throughout the exhibition, and we have mixed the times in the space of the gallery. Several of the works are newly produced, and the retrospective pieces are not entirely uncritical. It is our hope that Malmö’s Burning will inspire viewers to take a stance and will awaken in them a desire to do something creative themselves.

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SELECTED WORKS GILLES ALONSO LOUIS DE BELLE JULIAN BIRBRAJER OLE CHRISTIANSEN MATS ERIKSSON PHILIPP GALLON OLE MARIUS JOERGENSEN LUCIE KHAHOUTIAN AMELIE LANDRY ULF LUNDIN CHARLOTTE LYBEER ADRIEN PEZENNEC ROBERT RUTร D DANIELE SAMBO SIMONE SAPIENZA PER-OLOF STOLTZ

For this edition of Malmรถ Fotobiennal we have selected 16 works from up and coming artists that represents the theme of The Society of the Spectacle. These works are exhibited in different parts of the city and it was curated by the members of the board.

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Gilles Alonso Nantes 2017

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Gilles Alonso Parma 2017

Symétrie du Spectacle Gilles Alonso Concert halls designs are all guided by similar constraints. Sound propagation, ability to see the stage, and quick access to exits. And symmetry is the perfect way for all this needs. It’s a strange paradox to see the live show, image of freedom and non-conformism, be conducted in a rigorous setting, very mathematical, Whether it is in Italian theater with all its pomp, or in a simple, modern auditorium, the common point will always be this symmetry.

SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Gilles Alonso Barcelona 2017 46

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Louis De Belle From the series Besides Faith 2016

Besides Faith Louis De Belle Every two years, the members of the religious industry and representatives of the clergy meet in the North East of Italy for the World Fair for Church supplies, liturgical and ecclesiastical art. According to the BBC, the Italian market for religious goods is worth an estimated $5.2b a year. Besides Faith is a photographic series focusing on the grey area between sacred and profane, through unusual juxtapositions and flashy insights into this one-of-a-kind trade show.

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SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Louis De Belle From the series Besides Faith 2016

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Louis De Belle From the series Besides Faith 2016

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Julian Birbrajer Spegelvändningar #2 2014

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Julian Birbrajer Spegelvändningar #6 2014

Inversion [Spegelvändningar] Julian Birbajer I have an obsession—to explore language and time by means of photography. The sources of inspiration are words and concepts, dictionaries, encyclopedias, flea markets and cemeteries. I enjoy questioning conventions, trying to look beyond the surface. René Magritte’s ”Ceci n’est pas une pipe” have always fascinated me, because of the questions that arise on linguistic and figurative representation. At the same time I am interested in different aspects of identity. My domestic gods are Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. The isms that inspire me are conceptualism, dada and Fluxus. Through the looking glass.

What space is real—the one in the room or the one in the mirror, where the I sees its reflection and the Dutch landscape painted in the 17th century? Or is the person in the mirror the true I, and the landscape in the mirror the true milieu? ”Je est un autre”.

SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Julian Birbrajer Spegelvändningar #4 2014

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Julian Birbrajer Spegelvändningar #3 2014

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Ole Christiansen From the series Backdrop 2016

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Backdrop Ole Christiansen In the autumn of 2016 a new Prada store was made on Ströget in Copenhagen, the site was shielded by a wooden fence that suddenly created a temporary urban space, which was a fantastic backdrop and scene which was populated with random passers-by. I was there over 28 times during the three months to photograph the diversity of people who passed by.

SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Ole Christiansen From the series Backdrop 2016

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Ole Christiansen From the series Backdrop 2016

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Mats Eriksson Dunér Last man standing 2015

It was a time when everything was possible - All power to the Imagination! [Det var en tid då allt var möjligt - All makt åt Fantasin!]

Mats Eriksson Dunér The film installation ”It was a time when everything was possible – All power to the Imagination!”deals about the struggle for a house of All Activities, Gamla Bro, in Stockholm (1969-72). This was an idea of a space for the community emanated from an initiative to create new public spaces in the city, open to all ages and classes, where the activities would be based on the individual’s creativity. The film is produced in the form of a witness seminar about the Gamla Bro. The voices in the film are based on conversations, e-mail exchanges and leaflets that have subsequently been fused into a collective narrative. The film tells of the difficulties that arose during general meetings and in the face of a rigid and controlling bureaucracy. The activists’ passion and utopian-romantic ideology were gradually broken down as another reality asserted itself, while the house became filled with older alcoholics, homeless people and drug addicts.

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SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

Mats Eriksson DunĂŠr Arkivfoto Invigning av allaktivitetshuset Gamla Bro, September 1969 2015

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Philipp Gallon Dichotomies 2017

Necessary Measures Philipp Gallon

Philipp Gallon Augment #2 2017

Necessary Measures is a group of photographic images depicting memories of growing up queer and the strategies I used to conceal the parts of my identity that would evoke resentment or hostility with other people. The images are complemented with details that serve as a commentary on the numerous possibilities digital and social media offer for altering appearance, performing gender roles and adjust the way we are perceived. The work addresses various aspects of queer identity and talks aboutissues such as internalized homophobia and misogyny, shame and exclusion. It contains notions of how past and present experiences shape identity, and how the visible and invisible structures that surround us alter our assumptions of each other and of ourselves.

SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Philipp Gallon Angry at the Wind 2017

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Philipp Gallon Detection 2017

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Philipp Gallon Untitled (Syns Man Inte, Finns Man Inte) 2016

Philipp Gallon Untitled (Ziervogel) 2015

Ole Marius Joergensen At the Bridge 2016

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Ole Marius Joergensen Waiting 2016

Vignettes of a Salesman Ole Marius Joergensen A lot of traditions are being lost as new technologies have conquered our world.

The door-to-door salesman is a relic from the 50s. In Vignettes of a salesman, we follow a lonely, faceless salesman on his never-ending rounds, the last of his kind.

Ole Marius Joergensen is an artist with a background in film based in Asker, Norway. He combines humour and a Norwegian strain of surrealism in his work and finds his inspiration in the inner and outer landscapes of his countrymen.

S1 Foto Galleri Studio ¡ Sevedsgatan 6, 214 45 MalmÜ

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Ole Marius Joergensen The Old House 2016

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Lucie Khahoutian Untitled #03 2017

With All This Darkness Round Me I Feel Less Around Lucie Khahoutian At the crossroads between religious rituals and psychotic behaviors, this story narrates a slow plunge into insanity. From one step to another we are taken onto this one-way journey, wavering between isolation, abandonment, blindness and oblivion. The timid human figure fades away, becoming its own shadow, ghostlike, maybe, dehumanized, doomed. If eyes are ‘the window to the soul’, here they are often missing, hidden under blinders, ornaments, veils, or on the contrary, omnipresent, in the form of artifacts. As if our subject was literally loosing sight along with their discernment. Simple rituals of communal life become rituals of faith and devotion, soon one belongs to the other. Protagonists are then shapeless, passive forms, they don’t really see what is happening. They’ve become the shadows of forgotten ancestors. In this traditional setting, magic is invoked, to test faith almost, and resolve the inexplicable. The isolated duo appears weakened rather than fortified and struggles to communicate in the muttering of Babel’s tower. In the most absolute harmony we could not hide from solitude. Could we then be alone together?

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SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

Lucie Khahoutian Untitled #02 2017

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Lucie Khahoutian Untitled #04 2017

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Amélie Landry Dunes of the Shore Languedoc-Roussillon, France, 2012

The Wayward Paths Amélie Landry / Agence Vu’ Cruising sites can be found everywhere but not just anywhere. Once located in the heart of urban centres, today they are nearly exclusively located on the city limits or outside of cities: disused industrials zones, scrublands, motorway rest areas, and coastal dunes....

The Wayward Paths is an exploration of these sites of freedom where, despite the fear of police raids or gangs, despite threats of administrative closure, desires for free experiences between men of all ages and from all walks of life continue to be exercised, in autonomous and free spaces.

Distancing itself from the sensationalism that could be involved in photographic work in the realm of sexuality, the project takes on the form of an investigation inspired by the social sciences and is deployed through various types of documents: photographs of landscapes, portraits on site, cartographies of the territories, and finally testimonials from users. These are heavily relied upon, serving as the basis for the research and guiding its progress.

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SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Amélie Landry As they are passing in the woods, people are creating labyrinthic corridors.

Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France, 2015

Amélie Landry They met on an encountering area and lived together for several years Brittany, France, 2014 Amélie Landry Encountering areas Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France, 2015

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Ulf Lundin 5-9 2013

5-9 Ulf Lundin In the video 5-9 we’re following the everyday doings in an office building in the Stockholm area. The piece is shot secretly from the outside during dark hours.

Lundin has gathered material during several weeks. That material is put together digitally so that the result is 27 minutes long unbroken dolly shot. The result is a condensed reality where time and space has been manipulated. Lundin is not really interested in the office workers that are portrayed in 5-9. They represent all of us and our gaze is turned towards ourselves. How do we choose to live our lives?

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MOLEKYL GALLERY · Båstadsgatan 4, 214 39 Malmö

Ulf Lundin 5-9 2013

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Ulf Lundin 5-9 2013

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Charlotte Lybeer Li female 2016

Epidermis II Charlotte Lybeer Since 2003 Lybeer photographs the experience of today’s living in a highly artificial world. Her early works focus on the staged and controlled environments of gated communities and theme parks. Recently she photographed people who define their identity through codes and masquerades, demonstrating membership of one group while distancing themselves from mainstream society.

Epidermis II is a reference to the uppermost layer of the skin. Here, the costumed figures from Lybeer’s prior works are undressed. All that remains of the spectacular, extravagant or flashy masks from previous series is a thin layer of flesh-coloured Lycra that completely erases all facial features. There are no people to be seen; just blank figures who, at the very most, generate a bare minimum of meaning through a pose, accessory or a compositional detail.

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SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

Charlotte Lybeer Marcel & Josine 2016

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Charlotte Lybeer Bondje 2016 Charlotte Lybeer Morphy 2000 2016 86

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Adrien Pezennec Bloddy Sunday Museum 2015

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Adrien Pezennec www.auschwitz.org.pl 2012

Almost History Adrien Pezennec This is not a way to explain History but just a method to understand the present regarding how we commemorate. I concentrate myself on tragic events and I try to find anecdotes... This is finally more linked to the present than to the past since those anecdotes reflect our actual society. When Auschwitz become an attraction, we should ask ourselves if we still want to commemorate this way.

SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Adrien Pezennec Flowers Lidice 2015

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Adrien Pezennec House Mitrovica 2015

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Fair(y) Tales Robert Rutöd It seems as if there is a constant factor amidst the diversity of our dreams: The longing for a heavenly life, the hope for permanent feeling of happiness. Since time immemorial, this long awaited, beautiful earthly paradise has been distant.

But, in reality, are all the places equally distant from paradise? Are some places not closer? Maybe even enticingly close?

To explore these questions, the photographer Robert Rutöd went into the burlesque realm of trade fairs and exhibition areas. An almost ten-year expedition through materialized world of dreams is now visually retold in Fair(y) Tales.

“I feel just like Alice in Wonderland as I walk from the taster massage to a certified sleep consultant, from the undertakers’ fashion show to the wine tasting, from the Garden of Earthly Delights to the Jacob’s Ladders in the garden festival. In the turmoil between the horns of award-winning cattle champions, waiting their turn for the photo shoot of the breeding catalog, it can sometimes get a little queasy. But as the saying goes: They all lived happily until their deaths.”

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SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

Robert Rutรถd Holiday Fair 2017

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Robert Rutรถd Agriculture Fair 2017

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Robert Rutรถd Baby Fair 2017

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Daniele Sambo Screen 2014

Freetime: Notes on Italian Cinema Venues Daniele Sambo This series of photographs is part of a wider and ongoing research project on cinema venues in Italy: the roles they played, the relation with the general public and space. Notes, interviews and archival materials are interposed with a series of photographs created at the British School at Rome (2014). Some of the work was realised by creating a temporary installation to reconnect selected public spaces with the role they played as open-air cinemas in the past, suggesting the presence of screens, fences and shelters).

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SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

Daniele Sambo Shelter 2014 Daniele Sambo Fence 2014

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Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flower Simone Sapienza

Simone Sapienza Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flower 2016

Fascinated by the contradictions of post-war Vietnam, a country somewhat in limbo between free-market capitalism and the strict rules of the Communist party, Italian photographer Simone Sapienza embarked on a journey to explore the country beyond its perfect travel photographs. Almost 40 years after the victory of the Viet Cong troops against the USA, modern Vietnam has radically changed its ambitions and dreams. Populated by a young and energetic new generation, the country is likely to become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. However, behind this illusive economic freedom, the Communist government still holds absolute political power. Departing from the conventional photojournalistic approach, Sapienza crafted Charlie surfs on Lotus Flowers as a sequence of metaphorical responses to notions of power, economy, energy, exoticism and politics that characterise the current Vietnamese society. Like its national flower – the Lotus – Vietnam is going to rise above the surface of its recent muddy-water past to blossom with remarkable beauty. Allusive and ambiguous, Sapienza’s images prompt the viewer to question their presumptions about a country that is still ruled with order and control, yet eager to ride the wave of economic freedom.

SKÅNES KONSTFÖRENING · Bragegatan 15, 214 30 Malmö

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Simone Sapienza Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flower 2016

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Simone Sapienza Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flower 2016

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Per-Olof Stoltz Åsele 2006

Trademark Per-Olof Stoltz Trademark is a journey through the messages that surrounds us in the public space.

From the symbols of all those commercial brands we meet every day, to signals sent out to passersby from individual citizens. Some of these private messages are very clear and direct, others more diffuse as if the sender is unaware of the image being sent out. But where does this need to make a statement about ourselves come from? Why put the statue of liberty in your garden? Or light a pink heart on the balcony? Isn’t it enough to post your life on social media these days? Isn’t it enough to have ten close friends, 500 internet friends and 1000 followers? Obviously not.

So, let’s make a sign! Big, bright and full of colors. For everyone to see.

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Per-Olof Stoltz Kungälv 2000

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Per-Olof Stoltz Lund 2002

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Per-Olof Stoltz Eslรถv 2008

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LOCAL PERSPECTIVES DIGITALISEUM DUNKERS KULTURHUS FOTOGALLERIET [FORMAT] FOTOGRAFISK CENTER G3 - LOKSTALLARNA FOTOSKOLAN MUNKA GALLERI CC MOLEKYL GALLERY GALLERI KNUTKALASET MALMÖ MUSEER MALMÖ HÖGSKOLAN PANORA GALLERI ROSTRUM

During Malmö Fotobiennal the galleries and institutions around Malmö, Lund, Helsingborg and Copenhagen, are invited to present their own exhibitions, their perspectives over the year’s theme, contributing to the diversity of the biennale.

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John S. Webb Travelling

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Tadao Cern Comfort Zone 06 2013

Travelling John S. Webb In the exhibition Travelling, Webb is giving us a preview of a forthcoming piece of work – a work in progress, presented in a flow of digital images and including photographs that will not be finally selected from the 5,000 in the series. The images in the exhibition are from the following countries: USA, England, Wales, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, France, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Spain, Italy and Greece. He has been working with Travelling since 2009 and aims to complete the series by the spring of next year.

His work is concerned with humans’ relationship with nature and the urbanization of the land. He will often photograph in places that are considered “quite ordinary”– the kind of places that we often do not “see”. These are the places where we live and work, places we are often just pass through without a second glace or consideration. Offset with this are his photographs made in places of natural beauty.

DIGITALISEUM · Lodgatan 1, 211 24 Malmö

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Erik Johansson Demand & Supply 2017

Bending Reality Erik Johansson Erik Johansson’s photographic illusions of reality are captivating, poignant and challenge the eye. His images are a surreal rendering of everyday and familiar scenes that are enhanced with breath-taking optical illusions.

By tactfully arranging different shapes in the images, what we first perceive as a familiar and logical is, upon closer inspection, a play on our expectations.

Erik Johansson uses the camera as both the instrument and the method for realising his ideas, rather than simply capturing a moment, which is more often the case in traditional photography. The final image is created through a painstaking process that often consists of the combining hundreds of photographs into one.

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DUNKERS KULTURHUS ¡ Kungsgatan 11, 251 89 Helsingborg

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Erik Johansson The Cover Up 2013

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Anders Petersen Rom

Italia Anders Petersen, Lorenzo Castore and Martin Bogren Together, Anders Petersen, Lorenzo Castore and Martin Bogren present three distinct photographic personalities and perspectives of everyday life in Italy. The outcome is a portrait of the country that is anything but typical.

Anders Petersen has captured Italy on camera since the 1980s and is considered a master of international photography. Lorenzo Castore is an Italian filmmaker and photographer who finds inspiration from around the globe. Martin Bogren is a photographer who makes reference to his upbringing in Scania but also captures people from faraway places on film. One thing they all have in common is the belief that photography is life; as well as a personal history of the photographer.

Anders Petersen, Lorenzo Castore and Martin Bogren all work within a tradition defined by Christer Strömholm (1918-2002). Christer Strömholm’s photographic narrative has influenced several generations of photographers and can be described in short as humanistic street photography. In 2014, Dunkers kulturhus exhibited a major retrospective of Christer Strömholm’s work CHR – POST SCRIPTUM. ITALY makes reference to that exhibition as well as Dunkers kulturhus’ long-standing tradition of exhibiting black and white photography.

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DUNKERS KULTURHUS · Kungsgatan 11, 251 89 Helsingborg

Lorenzo Castore Grammichele 2007

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Anu Ramdas & Christian Danielewitz Still from Against the Grain 2016

Against the Grain Anu Ramdas and Christian Danielewitz The exhibition Against the Grain, by the Danish artists Anu Ramdas and Christian Danielewitz, focuses on the radioactive pollution in Inner Mongolia. Due to the recent years of technological development, a ruthless mining industry is now ongoing on other side of the earth. With abstract photographs, film and objects, the artists visualize the complexity around our explosive consumption of everyday technology.

In the autonomous province of Inner Mongolia in northern China, the world’s largest mine for the extraction of rare earth elements is located. Every year, the mine generates millions of tons of radioactive waste which is stored at the Weikuang Dam waste station.

Anu Ramdas & Christian Danielewitz Thorium 232 / Weikuang I 2016

In 2016 Ramdas and Danielewitz travelled to the Weikuang Dam. They brought along 20 light proof envelopes containing black-and-white negatives. On location they injected radioactive material in to the envelopes and let the negatives be exposed by the radiation.

FOTOGALLERIET [FORMAT] · Friisgatan 15, 214 21 Malmö

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Emil Salto Unfolded Hybercubes 1 2016/17

Devices Emil Salto In rummet [format] we present the installation DEVICES by Emil Salto. The exhibition is roughly sectioned into groups, each focusing on a specific geometrical shape: The Cube, and The Circle; The Hyper-Cube, and the Hilbert-Curve. Through media such as photography, light, and sculptural forms, Salto continues his research into the esoteric qualities of the materials, working both formally and experimentally.

His work is informed by Rudolf Steiner and his thought on the three-dimensional capacities of our conscious mind. Through intensive labour with geometrical shapes, Steiner argued, we would be able to visualize a fourth dimension which would offer us a direct and more intuitive perception of the world. Salto explores these possibilities.

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FOTOGALLERIET [FORMAT] ¡ Friisgatan 15, 214 21 MalmÜ

Emil Salto Unfolded Hybercubes 2 2016/17

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Camilla Berner Plant Collection no. 9, 512, Yeongdong-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 10.08.16 2016

Diana Scherer Intervowen 2016

Herbarium Andreas Greiner, Helene Schmitz and Diana Scherer The group exhibition HERBARIUM – photography and botany focuses on contemporary artists from Northern Europe, who all work at the intersection between photography and botany. HERBARIUM – photography and botany will, among others, present German artist Andreas Greiner’s scanning electron microscopy images of algae, Swedish photographer Helene Schmitz’ photographs of the Kudzu plant, one of the most invasive and aggressive plants in the world, and Diana Scherer’s stunning photos of root systems During the exhibition the photo journal Filter will publish an issue with the same theme as the exhibition; but besides focusing on contemporary art, the publication will also focus on the historical interplay between art, photography and science and the photographic medium’s essential influence on our understanding of plants through the 20th and 21st century. The exhibition is curated by Camilla Kragelund in collaboration with Kristine Kern from Fotografisk Center.

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FOTOGRAFISK CENTER· Staldgade 16, 1799 Copenhagen V, Denmark

Andreas Greiner Florian (Peridinium bipes) 2016

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AdeY Intertwine 2016

Intertwined AdeY AdeY is a British born photographer based in Malmö, Sweden. AdeY’s work captures those little moments of social oppression, humour, isolation, anxiety and depression.

It recognises that we not only change in relationship to our environment but that our environment adapts to what we become.

The images depict imbalances evident in contemporary society today by directly addressing issues of gender, normative behaviour and how society forces us to choose one direction or path. The subjects show our venerability, loneliness, strengths and expectations whilst highlighting the correlation between body and space.

AdeY Wrapped in Plastic 2016

AdeY’s work has been featured in a number of different print and web publications and in 2015 he published his first photobook Right and Left in Tokyo, Japan. During 2016 AdeY collaborated with Swedish photographer Kersti K and print publisher This Very Instant to produce the split zine Avalanche and in 2017 they released the second collaborative zine HEATH. G3 - LOKSTALLARNA · Södra Bulltoftavägen 51, 212 22 Malmö

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Jenny Eliasson My Home in Sweden 2015

SORRY IF WE BOTHER! Jenny Eliasson It is true that most of us live in material wealth but with limited opportunities to control the conditions for life such as Guy Debord describes it already in 1967. There is also an incomprehensible truth that alongside us people who rarely have an opportunity to become involved in La Société du Spectacle, even if they wanted to. Some from Europe’s most discriminated minority, the Roma, have turned to Malmo with the hope of a better life. In some cases, with the hope of a life at all.

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G3 - LOKSTALLARNA · Södra Bulltoftavägen 51, 212 22 Malmö

Jenny Eliasson Minuta at Work 2015

Jenny Eliasson A Single Room for the Night 2015 125

Drafts of Silence Alexis Rodríguez Cancino and Silas Bieri Drafts of silence, an audiovisual installation reveals the ongoing disappearance of the train industry at the former railway factory area in Kirseberg, Malmö. Created by visual artist Alexis Rodríguez Cancino and sound designer Silas Bieri, working at in-discourse in the heart of the train construction factory. The installation documents and re-interpret this gentrification phenomena via sound and image portraying interrupted patterns.

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G3 - LOKSTALLARNA · Södra Bulltoftavägen 51, 212 22 Malmö

Slime Mold Experience (performance) Heather Barnett & Emma Ribbing In collaboration with Heather Barnett, University professor of visual art (bio & eco− art) at St Martin College of Art, UK, Emma Ribbing creates a choreography based on the communication network of unicellular organisms − slime mold. These organisms behavioural patterns serve as basis for a choreographic simulation where communication functions and where it doesn’t. Where an individual can exist and where it disappears within their group.

Slime Mold Experience is a dance and science experience with strong symbolism of a sustainable communication system and its strengths and weaknesses. The resuIts of this experience will propose dance as a research tool for further analyses and discussions. The project wiII invite dancers, architects and city planners to be part of its laboratories and on−site experiments.

G3 - LOKSTALLARNA · Södra Bulltoftavägen 51, 212 22 Malmö

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Det Verkliga Livet Fotoskolan Munka G3 - LOKSTALLARNA Södra Bulltoftavägen 51, 212 22 Malmö

slösa inte på mej Agnes Hammander

Because no one takes pictures of me Nikki Rosenberg

En dag i livet livet i dagen Youcef Salinas Samo

Allt jag äger Marcus Karlsson

Fångat är förlorat Linnéa Björling

Dekonstruktion av det flytande jaget Jon Dahlström Johanna Schartau Nina Hagen, Concord House 1986

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Min digitala inköpslista Annsophie Anulf

http://bailitt.blogg.se Linnéa Malmborg

Anonym Fabian Svensson

Johanna Schartau Squattopoly Board game Work in Progress

jord.

Simon Nilsson förblindad Alicia Windfeldt

London Calling Johanna Schartau London Calling is showing the work in progress by artist Johanna Schartau, dealing with personal experiences from the squatter-movement in London during the 1980’s.

Bunden och förvriden

Sara Hägertorp The main focus in the project is a boardgame called “Squattopoly”, created by the artist as an anarchistic, “anti-Monopoly”, based on private memories from the time. A prototype of the game is shown at the gallery, as well as photographs taken at one of the squatts, capturing the atmosphere and glimpses of punk-singer Nina Hagen, a leading figure of inspiration from this era.

The audience can play the board game and confront some of the elements of being a young art student participating in a turbulent, anti-establishment context as well as to explore the strive for loosing your money to win the game.

Väg 00 Dennis Hansson

MOLEKYL GALLERY · Jöns Filsgatan 18, 211 33 Malmö

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Down and Out in Los Santos Alan Butler Down and Out in Los Santos is a project that explores the possibilities of autonomous artistic activity within the realm of corporate video game worlds. Since 2015, Irish artist Alan Butler has been using an in-game smartphone camera feature within Grand Theft Auto 5, to photograph the lives of the homeless in the virtual city of Los Santos. These primitive AI subjects perform no significant role in the narrative in the game, acting instead as the detritus that make up the video game’s ambient reality.

The series attempts to explore, with empathy, the lives of marginalized people and how our own economic hegemony is represented through corporate entertainment.

Existing only online, until now, a massive component of this series has involved using virtual photography to explore the contemporary ‘meta-life-cycle’ of the digital image. This exhibition for the Malmö Fotobiennal at Galleri CC, will be the premiere outing of Down and Out in Los Santos, off-line and in our reality. The exhibition will explore new frontiers in street photography through print, video and installation.

GALLERI CC· Båstadsgatan 4, 214 33 Malmö

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Zhou Hanshun Frenetic City 16

Frenetic City Zhou Hanshun To say life moves fast in a city is an understatement. From daily commuting to eating lunches to causal conversations, people go through life in an uncompromising and chaotic pace. Everyone from the rich to the poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, the young and the old – moves through the city like a chaotic mass, overcoming and absorbing anything in their path. Time in the city seem to flow quicker, memories in the city tend to fade away faster. Nothing seems to stand still in a city.

A UN report suggested that by 2050, the world’s population would reach 10 billion, with three-quarters of humanity living in our already swelling cities.

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MOLEKYL GALLERY · Båstadsgatan 4, 214 39 Malmö

Zhou Hanshun Frenetic City 18

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Kim Fristedt Malmberg 9.9.2013 – 19.10.2013

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Kim Fristedt Malmberg 9.9.2013 – 19.10.2013

Galleri Knutkalaset and St Knuts Torg Group exhibition A well thought-out scenario Very close and far away A moment Concrete and abstract GALLERI KNUTKALASET · S:t Knuts torg 3, 211 57 Malmö

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Stefan Wulff Nobody’s dinner 2004

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Cecilia Bergman

Jonas Dahlstrรถm Prepare to Meet Thy God 2012 137

Nina Backman Jump 2008

Aino Nina Backman This is the series of work by the Finnish born and Berlin based artist Nina Backman.

It is herself in the photos. These works that are performative acts in front of the camera. It is a series that started in the year 2006 and it keeps on growing, being actualized in various forms of installations.

The costume she wears is not innocent. It carries a heavy load of symbolic evidence and gravity with it. Neither is the title of the series just a neutral denominator. It is called Aino, referring to one of the central characters in the Finnish national epic called Kalevala, a collection of oral histories that was first brought together in 1835.

Both the dress and the figure Aino are nearly impossible to disentangle from the grounding myths of the Finnish national romantic ideology and social imagination.

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MALMÖ MUSEER · Malmöhusvägen 6, 201 24 Malmö

Nina Backman AIno 2008

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Frida Rรถnnlund

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Ida Fors

Malmö Högskola/K3 Ida Fors, Elin Wallin, Frida Rönnlund, Johanna Klingen, Fredrik Mårtensson, Lykke Sjödin The Visual Communication program is a 3-year, BA program at Malmö University that combines theory and creative practice in drawing, photography, and film/animation.

Students learn how to tell a visual story and communicate a visual message, as well as consider visual communication from a critical perspective.

These photographic projects are selections from the work of our third-year students.

It´s their final project in the program. In all these projects, students chose their own concept and direction, wrote their own brief, researched similar projects, and then produced the work seen here.

PANORA · Friisgatan 19 D, 214 21 Malmö

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Lina Manousogiannaki Spiderman

Sweet Sixty Lina Manousogiannaki The series “Sweet Sixty” is a series inspired by the economical crisis which has hit Greece in the last six years. I started working on this project as early as 2011. It is an allegoricalwork focusing on the generation of people which as up to now has been hit more harshly by the crisis, the retired. When the crisis started the retired people were the first target of the then Greek government in order to assemble money fast. People who worked their entire lives found themselves protesting for the obvious; to keep their right to a worthy life. Retirement is often seen as period of our working lives when one can finally enjoy the days left on this earthas they choose. Suddenly these people were forced to a lesser lifestyle than the one they had hopped and worked for up to now.

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PANORA · Friisgatan 19 D, 214 21 Malmö

Lina Manousogiannaki Superman

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Lina Manousogiannaki Cpt and Mrs America

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Lina Manousogiannaki Wonderwoman

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The Man Who Saw Too Much Directed by Trisha Ziff award-winning documentary about Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides, a man obsessed with photographing the accident, who discovered that the fate of others was his way of connecting to life. What is it about these photographs? When the image of the accident becomes the object of desire? Through the footsteps of Metinides and the work of the contemporary tabloid photographers we discover Mexico City through a narrative of crime scenes and accidents, while we are confronted by our own fascination with death, morbidity, rubbernecking through Metinides’ gaze.

Ticket price: 100 kr 146

PANORA · Friisgatan 19 D, 214 21 Malmö

Lager Västergatan 21 Ewa Berg, Anna Jin Hwa Borstam, Cian Burke, Gisela Eriksson, Sebastian Franzén, Christel Lundberg, Tuss Marie Lysén, Malin E Nilsson, Cecilia Sering, Carina Stankovich, Helga Steppan Nedslag Försöker greppa Vanvett Rör oss i olika lager Registrera Stuva om Ändra riktning Fördjupning Flytta blicken Precision Fånga Hitta en annan berättelse Sätta ner GALLERI ROSTRUM · Västergatan 21, 211 21 Malmö

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BILDENS FÖRAKTFULLA FÖRLJUGENHET – GUY DEBORD, SITUATIONISMEN OCH SKÅDESPELSSAMHÄLLET LARS DIURLIN Situationismen och dess grundare Guy Debord är synnerligen ogripbara till sin natur, och strävade också konstant efter att vara just det. En äkta avantgarderörelse stannar aldrig upp, det säger sig självt. Med all respekt skall undertecknad dock göra ett tappert försök att om än för en mycket kort stund, bromsa upp denna rörelse och fixera den på papper. I anslutning till en biennal som fokuserar på fotografi, skall vi nu se prov på bildens föraktfulla förljugenhet och det skådespelssamhälle som ersätter verkligheten då rummet omkring oss stelnar. Då livets subjektiva verklighet blir till objektiverad bild. Det Debord kallar: Skådespelssamhället.

Debord möter lettrismen Vi börjar vår resa i sydfrankrikes vårsol där vi möter den ditresta ungdomliga och uppkäftiga lettriströrelsen, vilken den närmast megalomane konstnären Isidore Isou format i efterkrigstidens Paris. Isou tog vid där dadaismen och surrealismen upphörde att tillföra något nytt till avantgardekonsten och kritiken av densamma. Isou menade att Baudelaire förintade anekdoten, Verlaine poesin, Rimbaud versmåttet och Tristan Tzara ordet. Om Tzaras dadaism, med sina onomatopoetiska deklamationer, såg som sin uppgift att bryta ner poesin till lösryckta och meningslösa men dock sammansatta ”ord”, så ville Isou gå ännu längre och, som rörelsens namn indikerar, lösgöra den minsta komponenten: bokstaven.

Isou var även filmskapare och befann sig 1952 vid filmfestivalen i Cannes för att se till att hans kontroversiella Traité de bave et d’éternité verkligen visades. Och det gjorde den, ackompanjerad av publikens ivriga burop, på sant avantgardemanér.

En som inte buade, var Guy Debord, som befann sig i salongen denna kväll.

Dock ”visades” endast filmens fyra timmar 148

långa ljudspår, då bildmaterialet inte färdigställdes i tid. Detta gick dock helt i linje med Isous fullständiga förakt mot fotografiet och han proklamerar: ”I en tid då människan är fullkomligt besatt av vackra bilder, ligger uppgiften i att förstöra dessa bilder”. När en konstarts potential mättats tillför den endast en överviktig excess och Isou liknade filmmediet vid en övergödd gris som snart skulle självdö i en metabolistisk tarmvredsexposion av fett och äckel. Filmbilden måste likt litteraturen dekonstrueras och brytas ner till sin minsta gemensamma nämnare, genom vad Isou kallade den diskrepanta filmens estetik: ett söndertuggande, spjälkande och uppkastande av gårdagens mästerverk.

Till ett förändrat Paris Fullständigt betagen väljer Debord att följa med Isou och dennes gelikar tillbaks till Paris, och bosätta sig i det sjabbiga konstnärskvarteret, tillika tillhållet för delar av Paris undre värld, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Urbanismens kraftfulla centrifugalkraft höll som bäst på att slunga ut oönskade element från centrum till gigantiska och kalla banlieues.

Allt för att bereda väg för bilen, gatunätets ständige auktoritet, där människan lyckas med konststycket att inuti dessa klaustrofobiska gjutna metallformar isolera sig från sin omvärld, nu också utanför hemmet. Längs med gatan står reklamskylten, kapitalismens stöttepelare som fulländar konsumismens dekor.

Den rådande ekonomiska ideologin materialiseras i arkitekturen. Spatialt likriktat och funktionellt à la arkitekten Le Corbusier. Inga oönskade element får förhindra skådespelets storebrorsliknande blick över ett naket avskalat verklighetens Alphaville. Och var tog alla människor som tidigare befolkat stadens gator egentligen vägen? Skådespelssamhället, med sina

nyligen skapade domesticerade fantasier, flyttade under denna tid bokstavligt talat in i hemmet i form av diverse massmediala företeelser, och människan med dem.

Här hade nu konstrueras ett artificiellt behov av att hålla sig inom hemmets isolerade härd, där man efter en dags arbete konfronteras av skådespelets ”underhållning” som likt en veritabel John Blund transformerar människans bohag till ett stilla björnide. Och på gatan utanför ekar människans frånvaro, ensligt likt de dehumaniserade landskapen i Giorgio De Chiricos målningar. Under femtiotalens första år erbjöd dock SaintGermain-des-Prés i varje fall till viss del möjligheten att försvinna, att gå under jorden. Ett sätt att undfly skådespelets förstenande medusablick. Denna vilja att sky rampljuset och i möjligaste mån undvika att kanoniseras skulle komma att bli grundläggande för situationismen i allmänhet och för Debord i synnerhet.

Då skådespelet negerade livet, skulle så också skådespelet i sig negeras. Debord markerade att det som konstituerade spår från ens liv, må det vara konst eller fotspår längs med Paris allt mer likriktade gator, endast gynnar polisens spårhundar.

Paris hade undergått en obarmhärtig urban metamorfos. Å ena sidan verkar omgivningen stanna upp och fixeras i sterila cementblock omsorgsfullt utplacerade för att skapa korrekt geometri, och å andra sidan, motsägelsefullt nog, upplevs staden allt flyktigare. Omvärlden rör sig allt snabbare. Men åt samma förutsägbara håll. Mitt i denna oxymorona paradox av konform föränderlighet, i detta av kommersialismen härjade slagfält med sina inverterade skyttegravar i skyn finner vi Debord, förbannande det som framför hans ögon håller på att hända staden Paris. Gatan representerade för honom en levande mötesplats för människor, inte på språng, utan på upptäcktsfärd.

Man skulle genom dérive, drift, ge sig ut i stadens vinklar och vrår och lyckas med konststycket att självmant gå vilse, och således liksom Thomas De Quinceys opiumätare försöka finna det verkliga livets nordvästpassage. Ett försök att finna en plats utanför skådespelet och avslöja den otydliga krackelyren i skådespelets falsifierade bild av verkligheten. Finna risporna i representationen.

Mot en konst utan verk; en total negation Det är ingen överdrift att påstå att Debords första film är näst intill så långt ifrån det i folkmun vedertagna begreppet ’film’ man kan komma. Det är en antifilm. Ett anti-verk. En negation. Om Isou påstod sig kunna ge intigheten en form, så lyckades Debord i Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) gå steget längre. Filmen innehåller inga bilder överhuvudtaget, är 75 minuter lång och består av en vit bild som visas när röster hörs på ljudbandet. När det är tyst är det också helt svart. Slutscenen utgörs av 24 minuters tystnad. Som väntat satt inte publiken tyst och stilla under visningen på Ciné-club d’Avant-Garde. Filmklubbens ordförande avbröt visningen tämligen snart, men de närvarande hann i varje fall med att lyssna på filmens inledande proklamationer, upplästa av Isou: ”’Just när visningen rullat igång skulle Guy-Ernest Debord ha stigit fram framför duken och hållit en introduktion. Hade han gjort det, så skulle han sagt: Det finns ingen film.

Biograffilmen är död. Film kan inte länge skapas. Om Ni önskar kan vi diskutera saken’”. Debord hade följaktligen berövat publiken dess voyeuristiska njutningar, åsamkat ett brott i det fetischerande förhållningssätt den passive åskådaren har till representationer, till filmbilden.

Där betraktaren föredrar återgivningen framför verkligheten, kopian framför originalet. En veritabel väckarklocka för biosalongens somnambuler. Likt en brechtiansk verfremdungseffekt framkallad utan ett verk, endast ett plötsligt tomt mellanrum i kulturkonsumtionens annars sömlösa repetitiva framställning. Således inleder Debord en fientlig relation med denne kontemplativa betraktare av skådespelets bilder. Vad som nu tog

form, var en obskyritetens estetik, en sann levnadskonst. En konst utan verk.

Hädanefter skulle ingen konst skapas endast levas, och Debords enda bestående verk under de närmaste åren var ett med krita klottrat ställningstagande 1953, som väl summerar Debords vägran att inkorporera sig själv i marknadens maskineri: ”Ne Travaillez Jamais!”.

Kan revolutionen materialiseras?

Ambitionen att revolutionera vardagen ställer sig mot oviljan att synas. Man gör entré på scenen men väl i spotlightens sken slår det en, att publikens blick har makten att förstelna ens varande, att kanonisera ens konst, ens tankar, och således blir man med ens en del av gårdagen, och gårdagens revolution är fullständigt ointressant. Avantgardismens ack så prekära problematik. Debords, lettristernas och senare situationisternas verk brottas oavbrutet med faktumet kring sin egen konkreta existens. Debords andra film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959) förhåller sig distanserat till sin publik och gömmer sig medvetet undan våra blickar och vägrar anamma filmens ”naturliga” gestalt: ”Det är klart att man kunde gjort en film kring detta. Men även om denna film skulle blivit just så osammanhängande och otillfredsställande som verkligheten den avspeglar skulle det än dock stannat vid en återskapelse - lika fattig och falsk som denna dåliga kameraåkning”, hör vi Debords lakoniska voice-over förkunna emedan vi bevittnar en medvetet dålig tagning. Om Sur le passage… främst problematiserade filmmediet i sig så finner vi denna samhällets avsaknad av sammanhang klart och tydligt redogjord för, samt förkroppsligad och avspeglad, i tredje filmen Critique de la separation (1961). Filmen är helt enkelt medvetet otillfredsställande i sitt uttryck därför att man endast kan påvisa samhällets egentliga bristfällighet, demystifiera och avfetischera det, medelst en otillfredsställande bild. En slags mimesis of incoherence, vilket skulle kunna översättas som ett härmande av samhällets brist på koherens, på sammanhang. Ju mer sammanhängande

och tillfredställande en film är, ju mer passiv är åskådaren. Debords filmer är inte en krossad spegel som fragmentariskt reflekterar en homogen verklighet, utan en fullständig avspegling av en fragmenterad krackelerad ”verklighet”.

Detta är en problematik som lyser igenom även gällande situationismen som helhet.

Aldrig är den så kvicksilverartat svår att greppa som när den just antagit en näst intill veritabel form, illustrerat som bäst en bit in i Debords fjärde film La Société du spectacle (1973) när plötsligt vita bokstäver mot svart bakgrund informerar tittaren om att: ”Om filmens rytm nu fortgår, så kanske ett viss filmiskt värde skulle framkomma. Men den kommer ej att fortgå.” Debords misstro till filmbilden är inte helt olik landsmannen Jean-Luc Godards förakt för densamma. Godard framhåller bildens förljugna kvaliteter flitigt i exempelvis British Sounds (1968): “Fotografiet är aldrig en reflektion av verkligheten. Endast en bild av densamma” och likadant i Vent d’Est (1969) ”Ce n’est pas une image juste, ce juste un image”. Men där Godard nöjer sig med medvetenheten i att konstatera att en bild är en lögn, en representation och ingenting annat, går Debord längre.

Bilden är för Debord inte juste un image utan innehar en inneboende lockande kraft som förstenar och samtidigt förmedlar och förstärker en oupphörlig uttråkning, en oavbruten alienation.

Men viktigt är också att för Debord är det egentligen inte bilden i sig som kritiseras. Det är inte verktyget i sig som alienerar arbetaren. Det inte är varan i sig som alienerar konsumenten, utan den rådande ideologin som fungerar som lockande vackert omslagspapper. Här närmar vi oss hur bilden draperas som konsumerbar vara, de facto innehållslös.

Endast pseudobehovens bytesvärde är intressant för skådespelet, den egentliga nyttan, bruksvärdet, har fullständigt fått ge vika för bildens illusion av nytta. Debord skriver i sitt magnus opus, 1967 års bok Skådespelssamhället att: ”Den verklige förbrukaren har blivit en konsument av illusioner. Varan är denna verkliga illusion och skådespelet dess allmänna manifestation”.

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och kritiskt verktyg använde Debord sig av stilgreppet détournement som man kan hävda är det viktigaste situationismen bidragit med inom konstvärlden (något som såklart inte var deras intention!).

Istället för att tillverka ny konst skulle man nu alltså använda sig av redan existerande verk. Med detta i åtanke tänker den konsthistoriskt beläste omedelbart på dadaisten Marcel Duchamps konstkritiska verk, så som mustaschen på Mona Lisa i L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) Enligt Debord är dock L.H.O.O.Q. inte intressantare än originalmålningen, och med tanke på Duchamps negationers hastiga inkorporerande i borgerlig konstkanon så har också dess kraft som negation genast avtagit och istället blivit till skådespelsmässiga visuella konsumtionsföremål, för evigt musealt förstenade. Bokstavligt är détournement en omdirigering av substansen inom ett ting för skapandet av ett nytt sammanhang med självkritiskt och subversivt ändamål.

För Debord var détournement mindre ett konstnärligt instrument än ett rent politiskt verktyg i stil med när stadens gatubeläggning omdirigerades mot urbanismens förvaltare under revoltvåren 1968.

människans tid och rum. En bild som har monopol på att framträda, en smickrande envägskommunikation som aldrig får något svar. Skådespelet har splittrat världens enhet i verklighet och bild, men kämpar ständigt för att uppvisa ett polerat sken av ren objektivitet. Att den ideologi som förkroppsligats i skådespelet inte bara är den sanna, utan endast är.

Då kapitalismens varuproduktion ackumulerat ett överskott (vilket är situationen i västvärlden sedan länge), kräver den plötsligt samarbete från arbetaren även utanför produktionssfärens arbetstid, i vilket dennes ”fria” tid blir konsumtionstid, och sammansatt således en oavbruten ockupation av livet. Ju mer fritid du besitter, desto mer kommer skådespelet att anstränga sig för att ockupera även denna tid, genom skapandet av ”behov”, resulterande i innehållslös konsumtion och meningslös underhållning. Lukács angriper hur även tiden således reifieras. Tid blir för Debord inget annat än varutid i konsumerbar förklädnad. Det vill säga tid blir till vara och följaktligen till en stelnad bild av varandet. Skådespelet är alltså kapital av en sådan ackumulationsgrad att det blir till bild.

Inget får stelna, varken varandet, skapandet eller tiden.

Det som kännetecknade situationismen var en stramt hållen linje mot allt vad konstnärlig produktivitet hette. Denna närmast fobiska rädsla för rampljuset, för objektifiering, för immobilitet, för kanonisering, är ett resultat av vad den ungerske marxisten Georg Lukács kallar för reifikationens fenomen. Här skapas en relation mellan statiska ting, varor som får en så kallad ”spöklik föremålslighet”. Det som reifierats genomgår ett förtingligande, fixeras och hamnar utanför den subjektiva levande världen, och konstituerar det Debord kallar ”skådespelssamhället” i vilket samhället övergår till att vara en negation av livet som blivit synligt. Om man förenklat ser skådespelet å sin sida och det verkliga samhället å andra sidan som ett motsatspar, så är det förstnämnda en falsk, homogeniserad återgivning av det sistnämnda, förmedlad med bilder, som totalt ockuperar

Ifrån inget och tillbaka Här börjar vi förstå varför bildskapande är ett så oerhört problematiskt område för Debord. Hurlements en faveur de Sades tomma vita och svarta filmrutor fylls av en avgörande innebörd, med långt större mening är skådespelets förljugna ytmässighet, och dessa negationer kom också att återkomma i var och en av Debords efterföljande filmer som ständigt berövar oss de voyeuristiska njutningar vi vant oss vid när vi går på bio. ”Publiken finner aldrig vad de lockas av. De lockas av det de faktiskt finner”. säger Debord i sin femte film Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film ‘La société du spectacle’ (1975). Ett påstående som fungerar i alla sammanhang där varan draperats i skådespelets åtråvärda förpackning, men dock inte vid de händelser då åskådaren finner bilden av inget, endast ett ickekonsumerbart svart hål, helt utan

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identifikationsmöjligheter. Vi behöver nämligen dessa bildens njutningar.

Ju banalare skådespelet gör arbetet, vardagen, och vår totala levnadsmiljö, ju mer måste detta kompenseras med konsumtion av bilder: vi konsumerar alltså tillslut en ickeautentisk bild av oss själva, med andra ord en stereotyp, som fungerar likt skådespelets veritabla rollbesättning, modellerad efter symbolen för det skenbart upplevda; kändisen, som enligt Debord framställer det samhälleliga arbetets oåtkomliga resultat genom att imitera de biprodukter som på något magiskt sätt placerats som mål bortom själva arbetet: makten och ledigheten. Men i verkligheten är det endast stereotyper vi har att välja emellan, mer lika oföränderliga löjliga-familjenkort, dragna för livet.

Låter man denna syn på människans position i samhället prägla en, likt Debord och situationisterna lät, så är det inte utan att en viss hopplöshet ger sig till känna. Denna melankoliska känsla ekar också igenom alla Debords verk. Om man sedan kontemplerar det faktum att det inte finns någon utväg förutom den totala revolutionen av vardagen, som vi alla innerst inne vet aldrig kommer att infinna sig, så skorrar situationisten Raul Vaneigems uppgivna, närmast suicidala ord inte längre så falskt som vid första läsningen: ”Ett liv byggt på passion kan aldrig förringas. Ett sådant liv bör hellre tas än stilla förmultna”. Debord tog slutligen sitt liv 1994.

Debord kom aldrig heller närmare den totala negationen än i sin första film.

Samtliga efterföljande verk var endast futila försök att formge samma negation.

Försök på förhand dömda att misslyckas.

Kanske var det denna uppgivenhet som ledde Debord till att redan 1958 skriva sina Mémoires? Som om allt därefter endast var en upprepning av det som en gång varit. Man kan se Debords hela oeuvre som en enda cirkulär rörelse, från inget, tillbaka till inget. Indikerat I Debords sista films palindromtitel In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) och manifesterat i samma films sluttext: ”Att gås igenom igen. Från början”.

Lars Diulin

June 1 - 11 2017

Celebrating photography with 57 exhitibions and portfolio reviews, conference, workshops, auction, artist talks and much more

Grand openinG June 1st at 5 pm in photo City WWW.COPENHAGENPHOTOFESTIVAL.COM

ARTOTEkET │ BANjA RATHNOV GALLERI & kuNSTHANDEL │ BARkAS ENGROS │ BLAA GALLERI │ BOLSjEFABRIkkEN │ BORCHS BuTIk │ BREADFIELD │ BREDGADE kuNSTHANDEL │ BRuuN RASMuSSEN kuNSTAukTIONER A/S │ ByENS HEGN │ CPH SILVER LAB │ DANMARkS FOTOMuSEuM │ DANMARkS MEDIE- OG jOuRNALISTHøjSkOLE │ DANSk ARkITEkTuR CENTER DAC │ DAVIDS SAMLING │ DEN ITALIENSkE AMBASSADE │ DET DANSkE FILMINSTITuT │ DET kONGELIGE BIBLIOTEk – DET NATIONALE FOTOMuSEuM │ DGI-ByEN │ DIAS kuNSTHAL │ EkS-RuMMET │ FABRIkkEN FOR kuNST OG DESIGN │ FATAMORGANA, DANMARkS FOTOGRAFISkE BILLEDkuNSTSkOLE │ FOTOGALLERIET [FORMAT] │ FOTOGRAFISk CENTER │ GALERIE PI │ GALLERI IMAGE │ GRAFISk EkSPERIMENTARIuM │ HANS ALF GALLERy │ HARBO BAR │ kALAALLIT ILLuuTAAT, DET GRøNLANDSkE HuS │ kBH FILM- OG FOTO SkOLE │ kEA POP-uP EXHIBITION SPACE │ kIRkEGAARDS ANTIkVARIAT │ kuLTuR øSTERBRO │ kuLTuRHuSET ISLANDS BRyGGE │ LENSCuLTuRE │ MALMö FOTOBIENNAL │ MARTIN ASBæk GALLERy │ METROSELSkABET │ METROSERVICE │ NLHSPACE │ NOMAD WORkSPACE │ PHOTOGRAPHERS LAB GALLERy │ PIXLART │ PuMPESTATIONEN │ RAGNAROCk, MuSEET FOR POP, ROCk OG uNGDOMSkuLTuR │ RIGSDAGSGåRDEN │ RuMMET [FORMAT] │ RåHuSET │ SALONEN │ 60SECONDS FESTIVAL │ SIXTyEIGHT ART INSTITuTE │ SjæLLANDSGADE BAD │ STOREy INSTITuTE │ THE TOILET (DIN NyE VEN) │ uNDERSTATIONEN │ VERA SkOLE FOR kuNST OG DESIGN │ VERDENSHjøRNET │ WAREHOuSE 9 │ øSTRE GASVæRk TEATER © Kiên Hoàng Lê (VN/GER) Bà Nôi Thiêu Thi Sâm | Grandmother Thiêu Thi Sâm, udstillet i Photo City 1. - 11. juni 2017.

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KATALOG JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY & VIDEO

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Konstnär, fotokonstnär, förläggare?

Mediaverkstaden är en kollektivverkstad mitt i Malmö som ger fotografer, illustratörer, konstnärer, författare och tidskriftsredaktörer tillgång till utrustning inom digital framställning och bearbetning av bild, video, ljud och trycksaker i egen regi.

Vi har ca 150 medlemmar, både enskilda personer och organisationer, och väldigt många av konst- och fotoutställningarna som visas på gallerier i Malmö med omnejd har producerats hos oss. Ansök om medlemsskap du också! Det gör du enkelt på vår hemsida: www.mediaverkstaden.org

MULTIPEL KONST Vi tror att multipeln som konstnärlig produkt har tiden för sig. Många har tröttnat på massproducerade reproduktioner, affischer och planscher men har – hur gärna man än vill – svårt