In an Exceptional Time / Umeå Academy of Fine Arts

BILDMUSEET 08/05 23/05 2021 ENGLISH

UMEÅ ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS /

I E T T

N AN XCEPIONAL IME

08/05 23/05

UMEÅ ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS / IN AN EXCEPTIONAL TIME

INTRODUCTION

The final exhibition from the Master program from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts is a very personal show of young artists, who have put their energy and reflections into an old poetic and narrative system – art – at a time when so many certitudes have started to erode. This exceptional time, will be a sort of hidden sub-text of the works presented. But there is also the trajectory of their individual practice, their interest to discuss materialities and media, like painting, video or sculpture, their narratives, stemming from the personal and a perception of the world. The approaches are individual, but this does not mean that they put up barriers of separation, since they communicate through the exhibited works.

Participating artists: Rakel Bergman Fröberg, Tekla Bergman Fröberg, Hannah Brännström, Joel Danielsson & Louise Öhman, André Fischer, Mrah Gazi, Erica Giacomazzi, Emma Hjelm, Judit Kristensen, Per Nenzelius, Charlotte Ostritsch, Jonatan Pihlgren, Yuri Rusinov (Georgios Lazaridis) and Sandra Wasara-Hammare.

Main tutor is the Berlin based artist Ariane Müller, guest teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Bildmuseet / 40 Years of International Contemporary Art in Umeå, Sweden

DIGITAL PROGRAM

SAT 8/5 14:00-15:00 Digital Opening / Degree Exhibition in Fine Arts 2021 Opening of this year’s masters degree exhibition from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå university.

Language: Swedish and English.

SUN 16/5 14:00-15:00 Film Presentation / Degree Exhibition in Fine Arts 2021 Film presentation: Students from the Master program in Fine Arts on their works in the degree exhibition at Bildmuseet. The series of short films are looped in the exhibition halls. At this digital event, we will stream the films together to be watched at home. Language: Swedish and English.

SUN 23/5 14:00-15:00 Digital Tour / Degree Exhibition in Fine Arts 2021 Museum curator Lisa Lundström gives a tour in the degree exhibition from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts.

Language: Swedish.

For more information and links see Bildmuseets website.

08/05 23/05

UMEÅ ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS / IN AN EXCEPTIONAL TIME

CURATOR ARIANE MÜLLER

Bildmuseet presents the final exhibition of the neighbouring art academy’s Master program. This two year program aims at providing space and time for aspiring artists of all media to discuss their practice but also to play with it, take up new materials — with possibilities provided by the school — and step into a studio practice, a process which in the end is a confrontation between desires, possibilities, and means to change them.

The final exhibition in this year is personal and individualistic, but is also open and full of questions. The school, their students, like all of us, have been going through an exceptional time. They have experienced a shift from closeness to distance, like a maturing process in a very short time. Many certitudes have started to erode, personal freedom seems to have become a counter-narration to concepts of care and responsibility. Security and personal resilience, not the big tales of adventure, have lately been the main stories of our lives.

The meeting of species has shown to be riskful, yet nature has shown to be a place of restful certitude. Risk itself has become linked with high possible costs, not only personal but for our societies. The present seems to be divided between introspection and a research for ways-out, while a ghostlike presence of our lived past lingers in the new socialities defined by electronic means. All of this can be traced in the works presented, since art provides an aesthetical framework of the now, while having the possibilities to go further and provide images for the future. This exceptional time, in any way, will be a sort of hidden sub-text of the works presented. But there is also the trajectory of the individual practice of the students, and their

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openness to discuss their works which has brought them from very different places to the Master program in Umeå. Provided by the academy they have also experienced what again has proven to be necessary for artistic work, the need for spaces to produce, the importance of exchange with workshops, craftspeople with insight about the specifics of material, the daily necessity of discourse with colleagues, and having the chance to engage with the works of others, and not at least an exchange with the public by having the chance to show and discuss their works. The approaches are individual, but this doesn’t mean that they put up barriers of separation. Art is, also, communication. It also tells us to trust our senses and build a collective image out of the reflected perceptions of young people who have put their energies and work into an old poetic and narrative system — art.

08/05 23/05

UMEÅ ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS / IN AN EXCEPTIONAL TIME

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Rakel Bergman Fröberg (f. 1994, Göteborg) Invocation Wood cut installation Game Plan Wood cut installation Our Will Be Done Mixed media A Last Dance Mixed media Cutting Board (Floor 6) Cow skin, wood cut “The (un)sensed insides of surrounding beings; from light to darkness and back again.” Adaptations of memories and remembrances, both near and far, self-perceived or captured, are central themes for Rakel Bergman Fröberg. She is interested in animals and animal behaviour and the encounters that arise in the human-animal, animal-animal, body-space and predatormachine collisions.

Woodcut is the technique that the artist regularly uses. Through the lines, she conveys the constantly ongoing stories — from life to death to life again. The works can be seen as investigations of a power play in which different layers of both submission and control are exposed: a constant questioning of everyday things and incidents in order to increase the power of the grip on reality.

Rakel Bergman Fröberg is interested in asking questions, but not always in giving simple answers.

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Tekla Bergman Fröberg (b. 1994, Gothenburg) CHAPTER 8, SECTION 23 57°12’01.4”N 12°11’04.4”E 57°41’55.6”N 11°59’14.4”E 63°48’49.5”N 20°18’07.4”E Collection of objects / Sculpture Signals From a Hole Under the Sky Ceramics and porcelain Point Me To the Sky Mixed media Lifetime Video, 9.27 min. in a loop Tekla Bergman Fröberg is interested in memories, both visible and invisible, and in deconstructing the current reality with different approaches and putting it together into new forms and readings. She searches for lost insights, lost sentences and languages. In her sculptural works, she often uses objects that have been thrown away and ended up in the darkest corner of the garbage dump: forgotten things, lost things, but also things that were once loved in the flow of time. When they are found, she gives them new life. She is fascinated by how fragile most things are, and also life in general. Art for her is a tool for understanding herself and her place on earth. She sees it as her calling to thoroughly examine the hidden and mysterious that hides on the fringes of our perception.

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Hannah Brännström (b. 1992, Stockholm) Sweep Casted and welded aluminium Stage Sculptured plaster, jute cloth, fabric, wood glue Peek-a-boo (Staircase floor 6) Curtain, polyester, varnish The relationship with the home and its interiors is the central theme of Hannah Brännström’s sculptures and spatial interventions. With a conviction that the home and the home’s objects have an inherent ability to maintain structures and patterns, she processes, imitates and manipulates them to force them to talk about our individual perceptions of common spaces.

The artist believes that in the encounter with an environment, a surface or a piece of furniture, the structural can become visible. The works in the exhibition examine how the subject becomes visible in an object. What happens to us when we experience an expectation in the room, which is not in line with our individual will and our desires? With references to the theatre, she wishes to emphasise how our actions, experiences and feelings reflect the role of the individual within the collective, and how we then perform and act in relation to other roles.

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Joel Danielsson (b. 1988, Örebro) Louise Öhman (b. 1989, Stockholm) Transmission HD video, sound, black box 14:51 min Mainly working with video, text, and installation, Joel Danielsson and Louise Öhman have formed an artist duo since 2014.

They move through the past, with a certain emphasis on the peripheral stories of history. Through their reading of these stories between fact and fiction, they often return to the form of the montage, where collisions and connections appear in constellations of sound, images, and descriptions of events.

Through this montage, they let speculative, haunting, and associative forms return as images. Transmission focuses on the monuments of archaic rituals and their connection to the spacecraft. Moving through three separate historical tales, what appears is the image of technology and its strive upwards, and that which continues to exist from afar, in what is close to us.

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André Fischer (b. 1978, Umeå) Vera Bronze Ann-Katrin Plaster Bruno Plaster Through depictive sculpture and drawing, André Fischer examines human nature as a sentient and reflective being. Working with models of different ages, he has sought an atmosphere of presence rather than performance and posturing. In observing the individual, he sees a path in the work, with questions that relate to the nature and conditions of life.

The exhibition features sculpture sketches that are based on thoughts about handling emotion. Can an image of a human being inspire comfort, or even grace in moments of despair?

Rather than believing that he can find direct answers, by means of the questions, the artist has been offered an entrance into the spiritual aspects of a person’s life.

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Mrah Gazi (b. 1991, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) Praise Be! The Church is Falling Under It’s Own Bloat Epoxy resin, oil paint, LED lights The Pesky Red Pill (Floor 0) Epoxy, MDF wood, oil paint Mrah Gazi explores aspects of historical contingencies, paradigm shifts, self-fulfilling prophecies, and unforeseen consequences. His approach is mostly dispassionate and tries to convey quirky and speculative relationships between the past and present and how fringe contemporary popular culture could be a prelude for what is to come. Through these works, Mrah Gazi explores the terms “The Blue Church” and “The Red Pill”. Popularised by the 1999 film “The Matrix”, the red pill is a metaphor for truth, waking up, enlightenment, etc. Within internet forums of any field, be it finance, philosophy, politics, cars, or videogames, it is used to clearly convey a stark change in position, an opting out or opting in, in some cases leading to forms of irrational extremisms which ignite a fierce reaction by the other side. “The blue church” is a metaphor popularised by the writer Jordan Hall to refer to the old sense-making apparatus of media and academia. Here, Mrah Gazi is expanding the metaphor as a placeholder for what seems to be a genuine, generational paradigm shift.

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Erica Giacomazzi (b. 1995, Venice, Italy) Lupus in Fabula Video sound installation, cloth, cables 31 min Having moved from the Venice Lagoon to the lush north of Sweden, Erica Giacomazzi investigates the context-sensitive scenarios around her, a landscape suddenly impervious and hostile where people have built a refuge of being. Her study starts from the historical and cultural heritage of the place, its collective memory. The landscape topography is pivotal for the interpretation. The waterways take the role of streets, the islands become monuments, and the countless stretches of water that dot the Swedish territory become large squares.

Lupus in Fabula is a raw documentary, a cutting-edge and uncontaminated point of view as a foreign perspective could be.

The authenticity and beauty behind the routine as rituals are parameters of this work, along with a close-up on choices, intimacy and freedom of a group of female dog sled mushers.

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Emma Hjelm (b. 1988, Stockholm) Suspense Video, stop motion animation, mixed media 13 min Emma Hjelm creates her animated films on the basis of a feeling or atmosphere. Subjects that she investigates include loneliness, longing, everyday life and the feeling of being uncomfortable.

She likes to inquisitively study a movement with the help of loops and repetitions. Through a combination of sound and human voices, the impression is conveyed that a room or object has a consciousness and remembers what it has experienced.

In this way it can tell its story.

The video work Suspense is based on the idea that all fictional characters actually exist. The characters live with each other in an inner house in which they are waiting to be used. The film portrays this house, in which the characters are housed in the different rooms. The different materials and techniques of the animation reflect their waiting and their desire to be ready to come out into the world.

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Judit Kristensen (b. 1990, Umeå) Screen Light and Sky Line Wine and Cheerios Galanty Show Electric Angel Boy Midnight Holding / ‫םולכ ילב ררועתתש בצמ שי םיבנג םע התשת םא‬ Sitting on a Borderline Oil on canvas In painting and drawing, Judit Kristensen depicts her life: a declaration of an outer world of Coca Cola, iPhones, breakfast cereal and Netflix is mixed with storytelling from an inner world of bright and dark fantasies. She wants to turn the viewer into a spy who witnesses emotionally charged stories playing out in an intimate private sphere. The subjects she returns to relate to everyday life and reality. The series of paintings on display in Bildmuseet is born out of claustrophobia, days and nights that merge together, confinement, social deprivation and melancholy during Corona isolation.

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Per Nenzelius (b. 1984, Kramfors) Building a Desert Installation: Sand, kick sled With a focus on fantasy and symbolism, Per Nenzelius examines the dissociation between existential questions and our everyday life. His work takes its form from personal experiences and a global flow of information; as a bow and arrow of the type that Chinese students used to besiege their university in Hong Kong in 2019, but made from cross-country skis from the Return Store at Gimonäs, or self-made camping equipment made of materials from Ikea, at a cost that is 20 times lower than a comparable product from Naturkompaniet.

The artist examines how we ourselves can satisfy our material desires and asks questions about need, consumption, survival and luxury. The Installation Building a Desert consists of two components and depicts the meeting between the idea of an alien desert and the locally well-known kick sled, where something as apparently irreconcilable as the passage of time and reflection collide. .

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Charlotte Ostritsch (f. Örebro, 1980) OBJECTS OF OUTMOST IMPORTANCE Reproduction Solar plate print OBJECTS OF OUTMOST IMPORTANCE Stilleben Oil on Canvas OBJECTS OF OUTMOST IMPORTANCE Mimesis Dry point Charlotte Ostritsch works in a process-based way and sees the actual doing as more important than the end result. Through repetition, retake, further repetition and adjustments, she creates structures and patterns with an inner logic. She has developed a method in which she repeats something pleasurable, like drawing something, until it is automated and she becomes like a machine. Body and thought are separated and the method takes her away from herself and the inner critic.

Her five-year-old son sometimes follows her creative process and they like to work with the same material and inspire and copy each other. The collaboration with the child is playful and liberating – in the seemingly meaningless, something meaningful arises. In the exhibition, Charlotte Ostritsch gives a picture of the reproductive process that has taken shape in clay, photos and prints.

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Jonatan Pihlgren (f. 1993, Hägersten) The Course of Broken Senses Oil on canvas The Spell Oil on canvas Borderland Oil on MDF The Gaze of Guilt Oil on MDF Jonatan Pihlgren works primarily with painting but also with sculpture, performance, cartoons and music. In the artistic process, he often uses improvisation: to enter states that can lead to reassessing things and changing their functions. He examines objects and their relationship to the human body. These actions may look grotesque but have still sprung from lustful creativity.

The series of paintings and sculptures depicts the path of the blind through life. They are people groping in a chaotic world.

The works are about confusion and powerlessness, but also about the openings that exist in everyday life, into fantasy and daydreams. Worlds and different wills meet and create knots or collages, scenes that in a dreamlike way are played out in several places at the same time.

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Yuri Rusinov (Georgios Lazaridis) (f. 1988, Temirtau, Kazakstan) I took my eyes off one thing to look at another Oil on canvas, with orbiting objects: a poem, and an object What a delight to sink the teeth into, to be a dog biting a chair Oil on canvas Waiting to break out in smiles Oil on canvas Styx Antenna Oil on canvas, wood, mounted on a construction Yuri Rusinov attempts to explore a collective subjective superstructure, a topos [place] that may not be spoken but traced.

He calls this tracing an “aimless venture”, navigation without a conclusion or purpose, a state of intuition and spontaneity, an operation for researching art that is not denouncing or rejecting aims, but provides a fruitful drift in “not understanding”.

This aimlessness is intuitive thinking without contrasting with analytical thinking, both are tools for understanding the duration of time, of the moment, of the event. Aspiring to be a cooperator instead of an operator in his work, he traces possibilities and recurring patterns by marking, sculpting, or repurposing surfaces. Yuri Rusinov searches for limitations that will make art readable as a language, taking into consideration not only the object of art but also its presentation.

Paintings removed from the wall are suspended and mounted on constructions, suggesting artwork as apparatus for what he calls events. Ultimately, Rusinov wants us to see the trajectories of expressions weaving our reality, to the point that we are domed, enclosed, and bordered.

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Sandra Wasara-Hammare, (b. 1986, Kiruna) I put my heart in my locker when I come and take it with me when I go. To Julia and Julia Vulcanised rubber, concrete, bronze, fabric, wall paint A conveyor belt made of vulcanised rubber, a wall painting and a sculpture in two parts, represent the work of Sandra Wasara-Hammare. In her art, she is interested in the present, norms, dark mantras, financial bonus systems, fears and despair as a mindset, from the perspective of her own experiences of more than ten years of work on the floor of one of Sweden’s largest mining companies.

The work I put my heart in my locker when I come and take it with me when I go. To Julia and Julia refers to a kind of mantra that the artist heard during her years on the floor and to two events that occurred in different places in Sweden, when two young women named Julia were killed in workplace accidents. One of them was pulled into a steel roller and the other fell through a rusty grating. The work calls for remembrance and depicts the artist’s wonder and anger at neglect and turned-away glances.

The materials meet our bodies and our minds and carry a message of sorrow.

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Rakel Bergman Fröberg

Rakel Bergman Fröberg

Yuri Rusinov

Yuri Rusinov

LIFT

André Fischer

Hannah Brännström

Erica Giacomazzi

Charlotte Ostritsch

Sandra Wasara-Hammare

ENTRANCE LIFT ENTRÉ

6

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Per Nenzelius Emma Hjelm

LIFT

Tekla Bergman Fröberg

Tekla Bergman Fröberg

Joel Danielsson & Louise Öhman

Jonatan Pihlgren

Rakel Bergman Fröberg

Mrah Gazi

Hannah Brännström

Judit Kristensen LIFT ENTRÉ

Hannah Brännström

ENTRANCE

Jonatan Pihlgren

ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS / IN AN EXCEPTIONAL TIME

ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS / IN AN EXCEPTIONAL TIME

PETER ÖHRNELL / PAINTINGS

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN / JOLE DOBE NA

SWEDISH PICTURE BOOK OF THE YEAR / CREATIVE WORKSHOP

RECEPTION

ENTRANCE

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN / JOLE DOBE NA

ENTRANCE

P

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