Ume책 Academy of Fine Arts SE-901 87 Ume책, Sweden www.art.umu.se
Master of Fine Arts 201 1 Ume책 Academy of Fine Arts
Curator Celia Prado 4
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A Broken World?
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Elin Bruun-Nystedt Elin ElfstrĂśm
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Helya Honar
Biographies
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Eskil Liepa
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Vida Mehri
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Thomas Olsson
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Tetyana Goryushina
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Sebastian MĂźgge
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Sana Gnobbeh
Karin Meissner
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Helena Piippo Larsson
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Alexander Svartvatten
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Rasmus West
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Doesn’t a road always have a goal, at least when we have chosen it ourselves? And we readily combine the physical goal with a metaphorical one up until the point, at which our terror at present explodes. The present or imaginary places and the physical room melt in one, as does our mirror image. It is claimed that this is a question of the voyeur’s distant gaze. A strategic gaze that displaces all activity to the space in which one cannot physically extend oneself. As a location, a university art college unites strategy and activity in the same space. And the place is subject to constant negotiation and re-construction. It never rests from its activities. Rest involves dreams and imaginings that cause the place to expand. The art college, as location, is not an entrance or a threshold onto the reality 8
“outside”, but is more of a state of constant investigative activities in the heart of the mycel of civilizational construction, as diverse as the number of students. The nooks and crannies of dreams and of reality are continually being shaped just as a beehive constantly grows in the gap between the hive and the world around it. The essential sun-warm and nutritious energy flows in both directions at the same time. A multiple space opens up, human and changeable, a space that allows us to see and to make ourselves present; a space that encourages our sense of responsibility and that lets us meet the face and the voice of the Other within ourselves. Image upon image, face after face, develop and move freely in the room like the sound of a human voice or a note in symbiosis with a musical instrument never previously seen. And each of the voices of the students bears a name: Elin Bruun Nystedt, Elin Elfström, Tatyana Goryushina, Sana Ghobbeh, Helya Honar, Eskil Liepa, Vida Mehri, Karin Meissner, Sebastian Mügge, Thomas Olsson, Helena Piippo Larsson, Alexander Svartvatten, Rasmus West. Celia Prado, the curator, has had overall charge of the exhibition at Bildmuseet, Professor Elin Wikström has acted as artistic supervisor and artist Stig Sjölund has served as the external examiner. Thanks to all of you for constantly recreating that habitation of doubts and misgivings that is our human condition. /Roland Spolander, Principal, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts 9
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Elin Bruun-Nystedt
Denmark
Wonderfully strange, surprising and arcane is how the world often appears to us when we are children. At least that is how I remember it. To move in the heights of grass straws and beetles gives another view of the world than the so-called overview of the adult world. An overview we readily see as the world itself, a world in which we both give shape to strategies and allow ourselves be shaped by them. We take the place of being creatzor and created. The process of gliding between the act of giving shape and living in what is shaped can be as thin as a hair; and an insight into the difference between these spaces can occur suddenly. That is how I reacted when I first encountered Elin Bruun-Nystedt’s installation Alley of Joy - Super Integral Reality Show at Gallery 60 in Bildmuseet in Umeå. The installation was clean and unembellished with one single very well known, but at the same time strange, object in the middle of the room: a television set in a scale that transformed me into a mini-man (child). And, of course, a small sofa of the kind that ensures that one never forgets that one sits exactly there in order to look at the furniture as well as the special program which is being broadcast just for me; a program whose story guides — coaches — me into the domestic space with its smells and chores. Elin plays all the parts in this home, including the herself. The home as place, space and location is investigated from many different perspectives in Elin’s projects. Not least as a space with iconic signs and acts. A horror cabinet of all the choices which have already been made and which we are being forced into. A strategy of those left behind if one likes, or, a curious dashing towards the future vision of the coached society. By staging acts in the kitchen (be it brewing coffee or baking buns and muffins) and by also referring to old instruction films from the 1950’s 12
Alley of joy — Super Integral Reality TV vernissage card, 2011 print on paper, 21 x 12,6 cm Coffee, take 1, video still, 2011, unedited HD media file, stereo sound, 9:06 min
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(for indicating how a normally designed “housewife” should be) Elin makes the home visible in a serious and humorous way as a form of construction module for the structure of our entire civilization. Thus not only for a traditionally female space but as a place shaping us all in regards to meetings with all other places. And in order to carry out our future visionary design we also invent the “life-style-coaches” who will give us the content we regard as essential. Also, our exterior walls, our shell, will be designed so as to correspond with our concept of how the world ought to be. We are, after all, adults and we decide the conditions of our lives for ourselves. But what happens when the Other has been invented by me? When the Other is constituted by my own consciousness, my personally invented “life-style-coach”? Can I really then discover something I can call “myself”? Increasing numbers of questions invade me as I come into contact with Elin Bruun-Nystedt’s investigations, projects and configurations, moving in the same existential space that I once met as child crawling through the tall grass among the beetles. /Roland H.T. Spolander Alley of joy — Super Integral Reality TV video still, 2011 HD, stereo sound, 16:02 min Alley of joy — Super Integral Reality TV installation view, 2011 corrugated cardboard, tape, wood, back projection screen, 2,5x 3 x 2,5m p. 16-19 Danes in Umeå video still, 2011 DV PAL 16:9 stereo sound
The violence of rules: How do we eat, sleep, socialise, tidy up, when, on what days, where - what happens if we don’t? Homeland. Or the closets in the corridor. Big and small spaces. Houses. Empty packages. I play myself but I could also play you. Or maybe a puppet or a marionette. Are we good enough? Do we belong? — Finding a homeland in an exile context, following a recipe, can we then finally escape from who we are? /Elin Bruun-Nystedt 15
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Elin Elfström
Sweden
Hey Britney, look at the camera! Look at the camera! Are you ok Britney? Britney looks at the camera and turns away, from flashes and photographers. Good-looking Britney means valuable pictures. Ugly Britney is even more expensive. Hard light, revealing gestures and quick decisions. Flashes hit the arm that protects her face. Flashes bounce against the expensive sunglasses. The camera is searching and chasing dreams. Looking for mistakes, making holes in the surface and breaking it. Britney, Jessica and Lindsay…flirting and resisting. Sexy blond dreams of silicone and extensions. Elin turns the pages of dodgy cheap magazines and cuts. Britney without hair, Britney with hair, Britney in a baseball cap and Britney in a pink wig. Britney kissing the camera. The camera is a mirror that Elin reflects in. She paints with care and tenderness on the glass. Pink colours and shades of blond. In LA the sun is shining. Elin paints the cold light from the camera’s flash sunny. Details are painted carefully with fine brushes. The reflection from Lindsay’s Prada glasses and the shine of Jessica’s lips, moist from lip-gloss. Small diamonds from expensive jewellery sparkle in the light. Elin paints, wipes it off, and starts over. Slowly the photograph becomes a painting. Runny mascara and misplaced extensions. Elin mixes dark colour tones. Expensive dress and cracked seams. Lindsay drops the bag, Britney shaves her hair and Jessica’s cleavage reveals her breast. Suri looks shyly at the photographer and mother Kate looks away. Elin paints. Lindsay is wasted and Britney is crying. Britney’s tears on the hard surface. 20
Britney bag, 2010 Oil on glass, 6 x 9 cm
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Elin touches her skin with thin straws. Mixing new colours and brushing Jessica’s blonde hair. She pulls the brush carefully over the surface. Crouched over the glass, she sees her own reflection. Elin meets Lindsay’s open mouth, kissing the picture. The photographer has been paid and runs away. Images that were yesterday’s money end up in the garbage. He’s looking forwards, tasting new blood. Elin picks up shards, collects and considers. Rapid decisions are slowed down. It takes time and requires space. Ugly becomes beautiful. Chased girls are allowed rest. Lost, hollow-eyed, sad and blurry, they look to Elin. She packs them gently, wrapping handkerchiefs around fragile glass images which must not break. Britney’s skin must not be scratched before the paint is dry. /Julia Peirone 22
Britney back, 2010 Oil on glass, 6 x 9 cm Lila Grace, 2010 Oil on glass, 10 x 10 cm p. 24-25 Den onda cirkeln (The Vicious Circle), 2010 Collage & Mixed media Installation in collaboration with Duda Bebek
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Nicole, 2010 Oil on glass, 13 x 16 cm Shiloh, 2011 Oil on glass, 10 x 10 cm
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Sana Ghobbeh
Iran
Decreating Bodies Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated. Destruction: to make something created pass into nothingness. A blameworthy substitute for decreation.
(Simone Weil) To say that Sana
Ghobbeh’s art represents ‘decreation of bodies’ expresses an ambiguous truth. We have to deal with the fragments of her body, and at the same time experience every pictorial fragment as a whole in itself. Even if we are seeking to imagine and picture the whole body from just a pictorial fragment, we are implicitly told that such a picture is nowhere to be found except as our own creation, which violently wrests her fragments out from the ambiguous realm of art and into something more un-ambiguous: society. Sana is in her decreation expressing desires and longings for continuity, after melting together with an other, an other that is also fragmented, decreated and therefore open for melting, for continuity. Saying this we also have to take seriously the aptitude for truth in her art, which in every sense of the word is itself fragmented, or decreated. Every expression we as fragmented bodies deliver is but a representation of our immediate condition. It is a mediated immediacy. There are abysses between these representations and the fragments of inner life, something we cannot get at through any other means than representation. Therefore each representation is also a creation in which form is subdued to content provided by fragments. Regardless of the medium, be it video art, poetry, drawing or architecture, what is produced is representations of fragmentations and each representation becomes a perspective. Even if we were adding them all we would not be closer to the whole than we are when experiencing 28
Wound, 2009 Mixed media, 50x70 cm
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the focused fragment on the screen, in a drawing or in her poetry. And the representations are beautiful, poetically hopeful but also tragic; tragic because they express, or represent, wounds never to be mended since they express and represent the human condition in its deepest sense, the inability to know ourselves without the other and that the other will create his or her own version of our representations. Sana’s art focuses its light upon our condition as becoming, a becoming detached from a realm of Being that likea tattoo prints its mark on our bodies, deciding our identity from elsewhere. Desire for wholeness in becoming is, as all desires, bittersweet. To be whole, to belong and be loved as a fragmented becoming body presupposes other bodies in fragments and rarely do we experience such representations of others. Rather we are presented an egotistic whole, which 30
already knows, not just its own self but also all the selves surrounding it. The panoptic gaze does not accept fragmentation; unifying reductions yes, but not multiplicities of fragmentations. And we cannot belong together with an un-mirroring unifying gaze which, like a flashlight, sheds its light upon us, creating our bodies and refusing to look into the lights of others; we cannot belong with such a gaze, only for. Belonging with presupposes assurance from other becoming bodies in fragments, assurances where mirroring provides space for becoming How far can you be close?, 2010 video installation — video in 3 pieces, 4:00 min p. 32-33, 34-35 How far can you be close?, 2010 video installation — video in 2 pieces, 5:03 min
what we are. At the same time what we are is only representation, which limits possibilities for knowing. At best we end up with a mutual question asked in amazement, a question implied by fragmented representations of becoming bodies; a question Sana’s art demands us to ask: “Who are You?” /Per Nilsson 31
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Tetyana Goryushina
Ukraine
1. Deeply connected to personal and emotional layers, Tetyana Goryushina’s work is concerned with the question of identity in a sensitive and introspective approach. Coming to Umeå from the Ukraine in a voluntary, but still difficult migration, the process of adaptation to this new social and linguistic environment became her main concern as well as a theme of artistic reflection and discourse. The catalysing event of this questioning was a fruit-tree pulled out of the ground in front of her window. Inspired, as she was, by the dramatic moment when the root was torn from its original soil and context, she started to use it not only as a raw material, but also as a metaphorical element, a kind of experimental mirror of her own identity. During the different stages of manipulation: photographing, cleaning, cutting, moving, hanging the root in the air above her head, then physically connecting to it, the time of reflection appears as an essential component in Tetyana Goryushina’s gradual process of both self-redefining and aesthetical spiritualization of the simple natural item. Through her staged physical connection with hair or arms to the root hanging above her head in a transcended and deified position symbolizing the labyrinth of thoughts as well as the spiritual roots, she quotes the whole history and tradition of a cultural symbol, from the imagery of ancient Greek and Roman mythologies like Ovid’s Metamorphoses — Apollo and Daphne, or the nymph Syrinx — to more recent artistic interpretations including works by Agnes Denes or Giuseppe Penone. 36
p.37 (detail), 38-39 Anna, watercolour on paper, 120x210 cm p. 40-41 Waiting for awakening, bird-cherry root. Photo credit: Tatjana Novikova p. 42-43 My Sweden, Installation view
2. She formulates her second, also highly topical answer to the same original questioning through a series of large-scale studies of her direct social environment, indubitably referring in their technique to her illustrative activities and her artistic education. In these lively, fresh, clear and technically unusual watercolour portraits of people she has met and lived with at the Umeå Art Academy. Her intention was to capture an intimate and fragile moment in the process of getting to know the person. The figures, looking straight into the viewer’s eyes, seem to be an echo of the root’s de-contextualization, as they are presented isolated from their original environment, floating like atmospheric phenomena on an empty background generally left completely white. In the portrait, made during conversation with the person, Tetyana Goryushina’s intention is much more to focus on catching the essence, the personality in a swift, fluent and spontaneous way than showing her technical skills. The portrait becomes, therefore, a sort of visual summary of concentrated marks, a sketch of chromatic impressions and shades of the personality, as the result of a subtle perceptive exercise of another human being. /Róna Kopeczky, Art historian and Curator 37
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Helya Honar
Iran
Every Day Life — an ongoing photographic process If we ask ourselves, what is meant by “everyday life” and really take this question seriously, we are almost duty bound to answer: everything. Everything we do and everything that is going on around us, this is every day life. Everyday routines, models and documents are constantly created and recreated. And perhaps we invented its opposite — the holiday — only to catch sight of our daily existences, our lives. The holiday as a way of remembering our lives, the life that has passed through previous generations as well as the life we both share and see passing before our eyes. Memory is an important part of mankind and we have invented many techniques in order to recall the entire history of humanity, including the individual. Poetry, drawings, paintings, photography, film, museums and so on — all of them are approaches to reality as well as techniques helping us to remember and to be present in the world. In his book Camera Lucida (La Chambre Claire) Roland Barthes noted with regard to the essence of photography: “In the photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole…” Something or someone has, during a specific moment, posed in front of the camera lens. The photographed “object” is made present for all future to come and becomes, through the photograph, a living part of our everyday existence although the “object” no longer exists. At least that is how I perceive Barthe’s line of thought. With this as a point of departure it is easy 44
p 45,47-51 Captured souls, 2010-11 Photography 150ex, 12x18cm
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to understand that one single photograph can change our entire daily life, and continue to do so in the future. Of course there are reasons to worry about such a powerful weapon. Not even today’s digital photographs have succeeded in deconstructing the feeling we have towards this weapon. One can possibly see the film as a way to disarm the photograph’s power to make the world present. In the childhood of photography the camera was an instrument available only to the few. The necessary equipment was extensive and demanded a thorough technical knowledge. Today almost every citizen is equipped with a camera. The camera has become something of an article of clothing that we would be most reluctantly ever to give up. We do not gladly leave our private space without a camera. The camera ensures that we can stay in constant contact with the places that have posed in front us even when we have left them. However, it is not an acting presence we carry along in our cameras (which belongs to the body) but an altogether authentic presence that melds together the moments of everyday life and holiday created in our photographs. /Roland H T Spolander 46
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Eskil Liepa
Sweden
Layers of Reality
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Samsung Reality is mediated in layers providing multitudes of perspectives. Whether there are possibilities of immediate experiences is doubtful but remains unknown. The best we have is mediated contact with a world that, strangely enough, is disappearing as we experience it. Memories, themselves mediated and assorted fragments, are brought into order by consciousness in one way or other and the future remains in the unknown even though our gaze tries to penetrate the mist lying ahead and the powers to be try desperately to bring future into experienced immediacy. And we have, now, a constant buzzing on our sensory systems, but how do we deal with it? One way is to take the layers and medias seriously as they represent reality, to place oneself within their frames and consciously represent and investigate how such framing effects, and affects, our views of the world and of ourselves. Such is the path taken by Eskil Liepa in Art, turning himself into a medium that, as Art, consists of a multitude of media. In his video art we are confronted with images of Eskil placed in spatiality of nature, which is absent since we confront the images on a flat screen. On top of the images diagrams are placed and we experience how they direct the images. The diagram performs its trick of trade and we return at the end to the beginning, where it all starts again since the films are looped. Eskil asks a lot of questions concerning layers of mediated realities (or whatever we are to term something that is mediated?). Layers we can identify are that there is some form of event that has taken place in spatial reality (a word that feels more and more uncomfortable to use as 52
D I A / Untitled_narrativs: Art-Book Nr 2, 2011 Book and tape p. 54-55 D I A. 2011 Installation, performance, video, tape diagram. Experimental studio site over the 7 days of the exhibition, with three stages: 1: The mapping and being in the space 2: Only tape diagram 3: Only tape objekt (end of exhibition)
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I write this on my computer). The event is represented first in flattened abstractions of recorded images on screen. This is not foreign to us living in a visual culture. What becomes clear is that the representation on the screen is a flattened abstraction chosen by Eskil from Gagarin’s point of view so to say, which means that it is a perspective. The next layer is represented by a diagram, which is placed on top of the images and steers the movement of the images on the screen. The diagram too is chosen by Eskil. He is the one actually governing it all, but he does so by submitting to the form of, first the event, then the camera, after that the images on the screen and, lastly, the diagram. Are the images chosen from the full richness of the spatial event in a blistering, vibrating now? Is the diagram determined by the flattened images arriving from the richness of the event? What is the relationship between the diagram and the event? Are diagrams themselves productive? What would a reality produced by a diagram be like? As in philosophy Art mostly leaves the world untouched. It is more important to pose the question than to ponder answers. Eskil is asking questions, and questions about diagrammatic production are asked in his installations where he use diagrams directly on the exhibition space, providing an abstract plane as a representation of reality. We become coordinates within such a diagram, and even if we as humans are unpredictable to some extent diagrams might govern our rote through a reality made abstract, substituting sensory richness for a controlling gaze, desire for basic needs, eroticism for pornography and nature for junk-space. A brave new world lies ahead. /Per Nilsson 56
p. 57, 58-59 Simulated studio and thought structures, 2009 Installation — wood, styrofoam and light.
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Vida Mehri
Iran
“a public space in which identities interact” (exiling yourself) In conversation with a tree we must conduct ourselves by listening to languages not invented by us. That sentence may seem absurd, just as it may seem absurd to have a conversation with a tree. Conversation implies communication between individuals. Conversation is an activity between people. And in order to be able to carry on these conversations, which are so important to us, we have invented many hundreds of different languages. But it is only momentary and a question of time and energy before we have learnt a new language or language system — and so the conversation can continue. The conversations over, or better expressed through, these limits become fewer and fewer as language after language is sent to the oblivion of history. Perhaps we return time after time to these different fields of oblivion although we realize that “man is nothing else than his life”. Man is his actions and conversations are actions. The human being lives now and it is in this global space of the now that the conversation takes place, no matter how it appears. And any language can teach any human being whatsoever, to apostrophize Gertrude Stein. Her texts still evoke dialogues which are possible to listen to in a way that brings anyone to life. But they must be listened to as a living process, as a space of growth, as a space in which trees are also found, trees whose language we so far only perceive in glimpses. In conversation with a tree we must conduct ourselves by listening to our own muteness. That sentence may seem absurd, as it is absurd to listen to the mute. To listen to that which is mute may mean that we give birth to 60
Persian Carpet (Censorship is beautiful!), detail, 2011 Interactive installation (fabric, sewn threads, printed photos on papers), 300 x450 cm
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other places in us than those that have been constructed in the language. Places that open us up. Places that enlarge our gaze and our consciousness towards other horizons and realities. The human being cannot always be p. 62 Hopes Grow!, 2010 Installation on the floor (tapes, green ink, printed photos on paper), 200 x200 cm
seen as a project liberated from the individual. The human being is the
p. 63 Persian Carpet (Censorship is beautiful!) (detail), 2011 Interactive installation (fabric, sewn threads, printed photos on papers), 300 x450 cm
In conversation with the memory of man we must conduct ourselves
p. 64-65 Persian Carpet (Censorship is beautiful!), 2011 Interactive installation (fabric, sewn threads, printed photos on papers), 300 x450 cm p. 66-67 Keep me logged in!, 2009-10 Installation (printed photos on papers, drawings, green yarns), 50 A4 papers randomly on the wall
individual. She is all that is in common but also everything that makes the individual’s presence and responsibility possible. by listening and awaiting. Memory belongs to the human being’s more uncertain vantage points. It can be difficult to discern who belongs or does not belong to the landscape of memory. Perhaps everything has to be moved to the present’s movement towards the future. Does this mean that we ought to hope for a return of the memory of the crawlers, the protozoan memory which, over time, gets obscured by innumerable conquerors? Perhaps it is a memory that is no longer available to the human person, perhaps the distance can today be bridged only by actors. Is then the human being not also the only actor and as such still a human being — and an artist? /Roland H T Spolander 63
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Karin Meissner
Sweden
Notes on reality and other matters Is reality perception? Perception as the process of attaining awareness or understanding sensory information. Our bodily senses that decipher and interpret our surroundings, our eyes, noses, ears and the sensitivity of our skin. Four senses with which to recognize space, place, spatiality, to create a context and to understand where we are, what we are and who we encounter? Close your eyes, enter a dark room, and sit down for a moment. You can still perceive the approximate size of the room you are in. Is it your hearing? A tiny vibration of a sound from somewhere bounces against a wall and leaves information deep inside your warm red eardrum. The inside of the ear, the cochlea, where those vibrations transform in to something else, into neural activity in your brain. Your brain recognizes this as the sign for a big space such as a church with echoing air and free-flowing space. Or as a more subdued “wardroby” sign: the walls are close at hand and the ceiling may be just above you, almost touching your head. Or did you open your eyes and perceive the space? The room wasn’t pitch black, wasn’t dark but was light. Let there be light and let us perceive with all of our cones and rods and let them, like Google Translate, convert the light into that other language, the language of electrical pulses that is understood best by our nervous system. The cones that speak so kindly of colour and the rods that concentrate on the shades of grey. You now see the room, the shape, the beginning and end of it, the patterns of its wallpaper and the cracks in its corners. We need light to see, but light is just a narrow region of the total spectrum, that wavy spectrum that includes radar, gamma, infrared, ultra violet, x-ray and all the other waves and rays. Visible light is a tiny octave to which our eyes are sensitive. Looked at in this way, we are almost blind. 68
p. 69, 74-75 Their Ability to Haunt Us, 2010 print on baryt, 300x420 mm p. 70, 72-73 The Junction to Everywhere, 2010 mixed media, part of installation p. 71 Scen IV, 2009 mixed media, aprox 2 m
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The sensory system started its reading and calculating of what, where and how. The receptors work at high pressure to send you the right impulses, letters to form the correct information down the nerve path to help you inform yourself of everything around you, the room you are in, your place of the moment, your space of choice. Here the reality of your senses begins and here the reality as you perceive it ends. There is a wall and there is an opening. There are borders to our perception of reality. 71
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Sebastian Mügge
Germany/Sweden
One can have a repulsive reaction when watching Sebastian’s work for the first time, feeling that he has entered a strange jungle, a dark nightmare. But if one comes closer and lets one’s eyes get accustomed to the ambient chaos, one will discover a complex world based on a profusion of captivating details and a strong personal imagery. I entered this jungle some years ago when I started to collaborate with Sebastian by photographing and filming his art pieces. I first came into contact with his paintings: big, impressive, and giving the impression of always being a little bit too much. Compulsive, never-finished action paintings in a survival mode, in which we can literally feel the multiple working sessions. But at the same time I immediately thought that they had the same freshness and freedom as animated films, especially Norman McLaren’s innovative essays on film stock. By painting on films without frames and thus creating a running flow of lines, curves and colours, he tried to free the film from the medium. And, somehow, Sebastian’s paintings are also concerned with getting rid of the good old medium. He is a painter without actual limits. He can theoretically paint on anything he finds, and he can use anything he finds to build his painting. Found surfaces and objects become an excuse for artistic creation. He is especially interested in those which carry affects from his daily life or his memories : a burned plastic bowl, beer caps, candy wraps, an abandoned carpet, an old pair of jeans. Such objects pop up from the support or become the support itself to tell a part of the most trivial story. And as he knows very well how to play with the composition (although his paintings may look like an anarchic interlace of jumping lines and curves, it has always been easy to find the right framing when pointing my camera at the surface to take a detail), the combination of both the object and the aesthetic construction creates the emotion. The result is an exhilarating feeling of liberty, but also a thirst for curiosity. The painting suddenly becomes a fertile field where secret artefacts can be hidden on the surface or behind the multiple layers of painting. It dances before us without delivering all its secrets. In the artist’s latest work it has become difficult to make the distinction between paintings and painted objects. His work has slowly developed 76
p. 77, 78-79 (detail) Such A Waste of Time, 2010 Mixed media, several objects, 76x338 cm / 333x168 cm
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into a joyful mix of both, within gigantic installations where the viewer is drawn into the artist’s world and takes part in a very special sensorial experience. There, serious experiences can be expressed more overtly: a stroller, children’s toys, an aborted fœtus lying in a shovel speak of childhood, family, paternity. At this point it would be very reductive to confine Sebastian in the painter’s roll. In fact, his artistic identities are multiple. He is, equally, a collector, a great recycler who can give a second life to abandoned objects. And then there is the drawing. Drawing plays an integral part in his art, and here also, all supports are good for the manic draughtsman. The tin-can series is the most obvious proof of this (as it is a clear expression of his collector’s identity). Hundreds, maybe thousands of tin-can ends, engraved with a helmet motif, are gathered to form an imposing army, ready to defend the entrance to the artist’s little empire. The same helmets, but also many other different drawn shapes, can be found in most of the paintings (including the painted objects). Sometimes inscribed on the painting itself, sometimes scribbled with a pencil, sometimes sketched with a brush, they scratch the surface of all the pieces and once again give rise to the desire to view further. It is no coincidence that we should find all of these drawn traces in Sebastian’s work. Over the past years he has produced an impressive number of drawings and drawing remains one of his favourite modes of expression. On the paper, he has lain down many crippled characters, 80
After 5 Years of Holiday, 2010 5172 drawings, mixed media on paper, tin can ends, 195m 2 Scharfschützenfest, 2011 Mixed media on canvas, 55x244cm p. 82-83 Feuertaufe, 2011 Mixed media on MDF and wood, several objects, tin can ends
very fat or ultra thin men and women who represent a certain idea of desperation, remembering tired circus figures or war veterans. The furious lines are combined to create those grotesque visions which stand between dream and nightmare. Once again Sebastian is threatening the traditional medium. Drawing is no longer only a matter of pen and paper, but it can imply generous spatters of painting on the sheet as well as a dialogue between text and images or a long story displayed on a roll of wallpaper. So if it is possible to draw everywhere, it is also possible to let the drawing become something else. The borders are suddenly undefined and we stand there a bit confused. In the end I am not sure anymore if all that I have written has real significance. Sebastian’s work is there before all to be seen and felt. It is a massive, queer production which can not really be categorised. Behind Sebastian’s freedom of style and the mockery he makes of conventions there is certainly a question of identity. The same recurrent identity symbols are placed like echoes all over his paintings and drawings, the helmet, of course, but also a cross, a German flag, the lost leg of a soldier. But I don’t know if Sebastian deliberately wants to ask any question. His art is more a matter of reaction. He forces us to react in front of the extent of his production. He forces us to adopt a new way of seeing things. He forces us to decrypt the signs he leaves all around. Nothing is sure any longer, nothing is comfortable anymore. /Véronique Dubois-Côté 81
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Thomas Olsson
Sweden
In conversation Martin Gustavsson: Throughout our conversations about painting I have always had the feeling that the surface of the painting, or in this case you might call it skin, was never bodily enough for you. In many ways it seems as though you want to create a more spatial or bodily skinlessness. Like an écorché, flayed flesh. Can you talk a little about that? Thomas Olsson: I see the canvas as a body or as a skin stretched out. About the surface a desire to break the flat. I like to create a surface that invites being touched. For me something happens when you are allowed to touch a painting. I have always been interested in my inside, and above all the experience of feelings and how they affect my behaviour. That the outside of a body can appear as calm and relaxed, but on the inside there is chaos with bodily sensations, restlessness and anxiety. I’ve been studying imagery and literature of the body and what happens to it when it’s exposed to physical and mental stress. Even if I can understand these functions they are still abstract. With a view to better understanding these functions I create projects that are both short and long, where I put myself in situations that test my physical and mental strengths and weaknesses. MG: On several occasions you have used toilet seats and tiles. One of
Marcel Duchamp’s best known works is Fountain, a urinal which was exhibited together with other Ready Mades in NYC 1917. Can you describe some of your thinking in relation to similarities and differences in your works and those of Duchamp? TO: The first thing I think about when I compare our pieces is that
Duchamp’s Fountain is for men. Only men have an intimate relationship to the piece. My piece is gender-neutral. Everybody has a relationship to the form. Duchamp’s intention was to take an object from one environment and place it in another and in that way change its meaning. Doing this in 1917 created a debate as to whether you really could do that. The focus was on whether this was art or not. Today I don’t have 84
SÄK.09, 2011 Acryl on pocelain, 60x40x30cm p. 86-87 SÄK.10, 2010 Acryl on canvas, 310x200cm p. 89 SÄK.10, 2010 (Detail) Acryl on canvas, 310x200cm
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Thomas Olsson:
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that problem and that isn’t were my focus lies. For me it isn’t enough just to change the WC’s environment. I want the toilet to be something more. For me it’s in that state where it’s about to change into something else. Something important happened when I went from having the toilet in its entirety on the floor covered in pink yarn until I started to take it apart. The thing that got my interest was this gape that arose when I turned the toilet round and put it up on the wall. MG: If men relate differently to Fountain than women, or indeed whether
your work is genderless, is an area where we might disagree. I notice a question around masculinity or maleness in all your pieces. You challenge yourself physically and psychologically in several of your projects and the toilet seats look like hunting trophies or prizes. Is your work also a gender investigation? TO: When you questioned me about Duchamp it became clear to me that
I chose the toilet from a gender perspective. It was important to me that both sexes could have the same intimate feeling you have when you are sitting on the toilet, but that isn’t where my focus lies. As you note, it’s about masculinity, maleness and what it means to have a body. MG: We have been talking a little about your forthcoming exhibition.
I understand that you are planning to use the gallery room and it’s spatial qualities in a different way than you usually do. Can you describe what you are planning to do? TO: What I want to create is an environment where the pieces can
become more than just individual items. I want to position the pieces in such a way as to create new spaces and levels. I’m also experimenting with an idea that the viewer could feel eyed by the pieces. 88
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Helena Piippo Larsson
Sweden
“It is clear that the existence of a very small bird can have an effect far beyond the size of its small body.” That sentence belongs to a work by Helena Piippo Larsson. Or rather — it is included in the construction of the piece. The awareness that the everyday often changes places with what seems to fill the entire space. Detail and entirety, interchangeable but always anchored to their specific places. Sounds perhaps enigmatic. But is scarcely more mysterious than the manner in which a great tit moves its head. We do not see the movement, only that its head is to be found, a millisecond later, in another place. It is not the movement of the bird that stutters its way through the room but our vision, our perception that does not keep up with the rapid movement. It is we ourselves who stutter along in the small gaps of reality. And the gaps at times become ditches of reality where also the very the very tiniest physical objects are evoked. Recalling myself that Helena, during her first years at the school, was most usually to be found in the heavier workshops among the iron, the bronze, castings, grinders and welding sets. Constantly prepared to re-examine and explore each material’s internal force in dialogue with her own, sensitively present, world of ideas. To Helena the entire world’s collection of the everyday seems to be open to re-examination. In the project Kindred Spirits, a year or so ago, Helena attempted to lift materiality into the projection room. She wanted the two seas — the Gulf of Bothnia and the Atlantic Ocean — to visually meet in the same (projection) room. To simply get in touch. To let the seas see and talk with each other, as if the strip of land comprising Sweden/Norway did not exist, is for me a playful and exciting idea with many entries and exits. Exterior 92
p. 93, 94-95 Modern Love, 2009-10 video installation stills, 5-10 min loop p. 96-97 Talgoxen Tittar, 2010 ink drawing on paper, installation ofdrawings and objects, 85 cm diameter
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and interior rooms merge. We are able fully to participate in what was unfamiliar only a few moments ago. The space of art as an in-between space, a space between nature and culture. A space in which nature is also allowed to occupy a place and to make its voice heard. The centuries-old trees in our cities carry many different stories from those of the human being. The entire time we have lived in the same space, incomprehensible to one another. If we listened more sensitively to everything that takes place in this mutual space the reality, which embraces the space of art, would become so much more alive and rich. And the dots, strokes and engravings that allow any drawing to be born through the darkness or in the white paper would be given a reality of their own. Drawing raises its own demands for life, not as a shadow of a life in another place, not as an illustration but as a fully present and self-evident innocence. Presence and the making present of such spaces are important in Helena Piippo’s work. A presence-making in the same generous and complex manner as in the novels by Marguerite Duras where beaches, sunsets and corridors of yearnings for kinship and love are called forth sentence by sentence. In her novel Emily L., Duras writes: “The sunset continues to rise along the walls. It has left the mirror”. And as I read these short sentences she evokes for me precisely such an island of presence that grows to a complete and entirely unique space. A space has been born and I (we) along with it. [Early morning. Looking out over the balcony on the third floor in the city. The light and the small birds are waking up at the same time. It is still winter. Cold. The snow is sculpting the city without details and shadows. If I were residing on a cloud, high up above, everything would perhaps become white. The distance, the balance between the visible and invisible is disarranged.] /Roland Spolander 98
Kustlinjen, Almö-Lindö, 2011 pencil drawing on paper, 50x70 cm Kustlinjen, Almö-Lindö, 2010 pencil drawing on paper, 50x70 cm
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Alexander Svartvatten
Sweden
In Between Dialogues In Between Roland Spolander: When people talk about the meaning that Attic and Basement have for our understanding of human space today, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s reveries about the house, the shell and the infinity of internal space always come to mind. But despite the fact that Bachelard’s thinking pops up in the mind, I can’t remember one single line from his hand. It’s more of a mood, a feeling in space that gets all objects, or bodies, to melt together in a mutual cell or attitude. A stretchy approach that also shapes metaphors into the world of exact facts. Alexander Svartvatten: I have not read Bachelard, but I share this fascination with the Attic and the Basement. Being opposites in some ways, but often sharing the function of containing the past — a way of life not being lived anymore. But what happens to this sculpture in which we are all enclosed if these distant places take over our present living spaces? Perhaps this kind of relation between past, present and future is constantly in motion, like that of a dragon chasing its tail, or the other way around. RS: Perhaps we can think of ourselves as a kind of “Neuromancers” as William Gibson once called us, people who import the future into the present, where the act itself becomes the mirror image that can move us out of the sculpture — that is, the self as an explosive and intuitive catapult. You seem to use this more as a state of mind than of redemption? To focus on the process itself, it is the construction of the “house” (if we call it that) and not the result that I find interesting. Or maybe it’s a way of focusing on both process and object? A way of incorporating processes such as vision, writing, reading and sketching in the “house”? AS: Hopefully, the dynamics of this labyrinthine house, function as a catapult, opening up a new level of consciousness, which enables us to make possible connections that would otherwise have been difficult to 100
p. 101-105 Dolly & The Gelatin King, 2011 Installation Helena Pedersen, PhD, Malmö University Martina Wolgast, Artist
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achieve. Similar to the idea of the catapult is, too, the close relation between film and war made by Paul Virilio. So intertwined, one could call it the movement of the double helix. These two vectors of war and cinema, have sculpted our recent period and unfolded it into our common house. It is omnipresent in physical structures as well as in how we perceive the world. It is simultaneously both the taker of life and the artificial maker of life. The non-human animal has had an essential role for the progression of film and war. With the continued human civilization, other life forms have been extensively displaced or disregarded to a point of merely existing in our minds as clichÊs. Over time, moving images and war have changed in fundamental ways. Genetic technologies are what I would say, probably a new vector of artificial movement, making a triple helix together with film and war in shaping the time and space of our common living room. RS: That kind of gathering of our technological progress and the relationship between it and our humanization of the world interests me. Do we live outside or in addition to our technical and scientific progress? Or — have we imported ourselves to a future where these issues will no longer allow themselves to be? 105
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Rasmus West
Finland/Sweden
To use a method without a predetermined goal, or to have a goal which you always fully submit to but which, time and again, you fail to reach instead achieving something entirely different — something which surprises oneself — is perhaps the hardest trick to play. It is unrepeatable — an antimethod. It is also perhaps the most interesting and necessary way to work if you really want to be at an in-between. If you want both one and the other, to arrive and exit between that which could be called concept and sensation, but which as phenomena always appear as one. The art of Rasmus West is packed with theory, texts and references which on the one hand are connected to history and on the other hand to personal situations but, above all, are forged into powerful aesthetic expressions by which the active viewer get pulled in, as an immersed body into a process which does not stagnate, instead hurling you back and forth between that which we cannot categorize. To constantly trick oneself into success by luck but never admitting it, is not easy. It’s a skill! It’s a craft. Sensibility and rational decisions. Knowledge and the ability to improvise although you know the impossible — that is what’s interesting. In hosts of ideas, apparently without specific reasons although highly accurate — mixed with bad jokes, romantic luminances and brutal, equivocal bodily utterances I pass through a precarious landscape. The works in their entirety do not make it easier to see, but easier to not interpret. The idiosyncratic turn is amassing — I’m facing a body that contemplates, hums, chuckles, is concerned, satisfied and surprised. In the act of selection he always sidesteps to find that curious current where there might, maybe, where there could be something to discover. /Magni Borgehed 108
p. 109, 110-111 Camera and performer in a continous double helix movement, projected sideways, 2011 Stills from stop-motion video loop, 1080p single channel, without sound p. 112-113 A rotating device by which a camera captures it’s surroundings. It’s image is transmitted to a screen, 2011 Video transmitted live to a television, apparatus (180 cm height, diameter of the rotation 180cm) with electrical engine, fence p. 114-115 Someone sitting in the artists chair, back towards the viewer, reading, with a stack of books beside, 2011 A chair, copies of Some Texts — a book by the artist, a lamp, title sign
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Elin Bruun-Nystedt b. 1979 in Copenhagen, Denmark Lives and works in Umeå, Sweden elin.bruun.nystedt@gmail.com// www.elinbruun-nystedt.net Education 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2002-04 Lunds Konst o Designskola, Sweden 2005-06 Kunsthøjskolen på Ærø, Denmark 2006 Danmarks Radios Talentværksted (DR talent workshop) Selected Exhibitions and Videoscreenings 2011 GLÄDJENS GRÄND, MA solo show, Galleri 60, Bildmuseet, Umeå Sweden// CologneOFF 2011, Kharkov City Art Gallery, Ukraine// art:screen on FlatScreen, Canteen Gallery 2, Beaconsfield, London, United Kingdom // International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands // Göteborg International Film Festival, Sweden// Magmart Festival, Naple, Italy// Konstfrämjandet Bergslagen, Örebro, Sweden. 2010 Art Video Screening Galleri Kakelhallen, Mariehamn, The Aland Islands// Art Video Screening Vasterås Konstmuseum, Sweden | Örebro international videoart festival, Sweden// ENTERPRISE: ready to embark on bold new adventures, Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden 2009 Alt_cph. Copenhagen alternative Artfair, Denmark// The Reflection Pool, VERKLIGHETENs gårdshus, Umeå, Sweden// SPRING09, Århus kunstbygning, Århus, Denmark 2008 NTM, Cushion Project The Stage, Seoul, South Korea// PMNHTTTCAJIREEY, Skellefteå Konsthall, Sweden// fjyssel Soundperformance, Invigningskonsert Ljusfestivalen, Umeå, Sweden// LCPH, Malmöfestivalen, Malmö, Sweden// Kalejda. Gothenburg, Sweden//fjyssel soundperformance at LARM-festival, Copenhagen University, Denmark// Reflections Gallery Pixel, Copenhagen, Denmark 2007 Gallery 77m3, Århus, Denmark// Alternativ film/ video Festival of new film and video, Belgrade, Serbia// Alt_cph. Copenhagen alternative Artfair// Denmark 2006 Charlottenborg, Forårsudstillingen, Copenhagen, Denmark 2003 Ungkonst, Copenhagen and Malmö, Denmark and Sweden Other 2009 Award: The municipality of Aarhus at SPRING09 Co-funder of Galleri Maskinen, Umeå
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Elin Elfström b. 1981 in Årsunda, Sweden Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden elin.elfstrom@gmail.com// www.elinelfstrom.se Education 2005-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2009 Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria 2007 Academy of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam 2005 Art History, Stockholm University 2004 Creative Writing, Mittuniversitetet 2002-03 Fashion and Designschool, Sandviken 2000-02 Konstskolan, Gävle (Prepatorial Artschool) Exhibitions Solo shows 2011 Galleri 60 Bildmuseet Umeå 2010-11 Chicas Locas <3 Museo de la Ciudad de Queretaro, Mexico 2008 Galleri Lundhåstrand, Stockholm 2006 Galleri K, Gävle 2002 Galleri K, Gävle Group shows 2011 Galleri Andersson-Sandström, Stockholm, MA groupshow// Stene Projects, Stockholm// MARKET Art Fair Stockholm (Stene Projects) 2010 Hey, Its Enrico Palazzo! Göteborg// Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm// Rundgang Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna 2009 What is Identity, University of Fine Arts, Hanoi Vietnam 2008 Bildmuseet Umeå. BA-show 2007 Academy of Fine Arts, Hanoi 2005 Ecke Hedbergs konstnärshem, Sandviken 2004 Sandvikens Konsthall 2003 Sanvikens Konsthall// Gävle Länsmuseum, Länskonst 2002 Axmar brygga, Gävle// Gävle Konstcentrum Konstskolan graduationshow 2001 Bollnäs Konsthall Scholarships 2010 Umeå Universitet, International studies 2009 Erasmus, studies at Akademie der Bildene Künste Vienna, Austria 2007 Academy of Fine Arts Umeå/SIDA. Studies at Hanoi Academy of Fine Arts, Vietnam 2005 Karin and Erik Engmans Stipendium 2003 Landstinget Gävleborgs natura-stipendium Katalonien Residency at Rodriguez-Amat centre d’art contemporani Catalonia, Spain 2005-09 Lars Bucans Kulturstiftelse 2005-09 Gunvor Göranssons Kulturstiftelse 2000-10 Göranssonska Fonden Representation Gävle kommun Museo de la Ciudad de Queretaro, Mexico
Sana Ghobbeh b. 1984 in Tehran, Iran Lives and works in Umeå, Sweden sana84a@yahoo.com//www.sanagh.blogspot.com Education 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2002-06 Bachelor of Architecture (BSc), Art and Architecture faculty, Azad Tehran University, Tehran ,Iran 1997-01 Mathematics diploma, Fatemeh high school, Tehran, Iran Private education 2008-09 Mahe Mehr Institute (Aesthetic and philosophy of Art, Post Modernism Movements) 2005-09 Figurative drawing course at Mehrin Fine Art Institute 2005-08 Art History at Aria Fine Art Institute (Pre-historic, Classic, Middle ages, Modern Art, Post modernism, Feminism, Aesthetic, Art criticism) Exhibitions Solo shows 2011 Galleri 60, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden Group shows 2011 Galleri Andersson Sandström, Stockholm, Sweden// Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden 2010 Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden// Umeå Academy of Fine Art (Open House), Umeå, Sweden 2009 Mehrin Gallery, Tehran, Iran Tutorials and other activities 2010 Working at an Architectural office as an invited photographer for an Architectural competition 2008 Guest teacher in Drawing for students at Art and Architecture faculty ,Tehran University. 2006-2008 Graphic computer programs (Photoshop, AutoCad, 3D max, Vegas Pro, Premier)
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Tetyana Goryushina b. 1978 in Kyiv, Ukraine Lives and works in Umeå, Sweden tania@goryushina.com// www.goryushina.com Education 2005-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2006 National Technical University, publishing and graphic arts. Kyiv, Ukraine 1998 Art Industrial College, faculty of ceramics. Kyiv, Ukraine Exhibitions Solo shows 2011 My Sweden Gallery-60, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden 2010 Undressed Gorobets Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine 2009 Fairy Tail Images-2, Sribni Dzvoni Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine// Fairy Tail Images, Parsuna Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine 2008 Hide-and-seek, Kobalt Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine; 2006 Ukraine without Boundaries, The Foundation of Arts Development, Kyiv, Ukraine; 2004 Vera and Nadezhda, Griffon Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine; Residencies, Bienalle, Projects 2011 Open House in Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå, Sweden 2010 Enterprice, Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden 2009 Drawing workshop, Land of the Dreams fest, Kyiv, Ukraine 2008 Participation in the International «Marc Rothko Plener», Daugavpils, Latvia 2006 Drawing workshop, Charity event. Young artist against of AIDC, Lavra gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine// International Biennial of Drawing, Pilsen, Czech Republic// Triennial of Drawing, Central House of The Art, Kyiv, Ukraine 2003 Ecological fest by The White Lake, Ryvne, Ukraine Awards and Honors 2008 Winner of a grant from the President of Ukraine for developing of social project for children`s orphanages and hospitals; 2003 ”Fern Flower”, NTUU ”KPI”, 2nd place, Kyiv, Ukraine 2002 ”Fern Flower”, NTUU ”KPI”, 1st place, Kyiv, Ukraine
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Helya Honar b. 1982 in Shiraz, Iran Lives and work in Umeå, Sweden heliahonar@yahoo.com Education 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2001-05 Bachelor of Graphic Design, Sooreh higher Education Institute. Shiraz, Iran 1999-00 Art Foundation Course 1996-99 Studied Graphic Design in high school Exhibitons Solo show 2011 Galleri 60, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden Group shows 2011 Galleri Andersson Sandström, Stockholm, Sweden// Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden 2010 Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden// Umeå Academy of Fine Art (Open House), Umeå, Sweden Tutorials and other activities 2005-06 ISP Company (Internet Service Provider), Shiraz, Iran: Designer (Graphic) 2006-08 High school of Art, Shiraz, Iran: Teacher 2006-09 Art Institute, Shiraz, Iran: Teacher
Eskil Karl Liepa b. 1979 in Kalmar, Sweden Lives and work in Umeå, Sweden eskilliepa@gmail.com// www.eskilliepa.com Education. 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2006-09 Bachelor of Fine Arts. Umeå Art Academy 2001-03 Ölands konstskola 1998-2000 National Diploma in Design, Brighton Exhibitions Solo shows 2011 D I A exprimental Exhibitions / Performance at G60 Bildmuseet Umeå 2006 Embrace the gliding, Artist of the month at Kalmar Konstmuseum 2005 Teater Galleriet, Kalmar Group exhibitions. (selection) 2011 Umeå Academy of Fine Arts MFA graduation show at Bildmuseet Umeå 2010 Enterprise, Wip:Konsthall Stockholm 2009 Tourist Attraction Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin// Light Club. BFA graduation show at Galleri 60, Bildmuseet: 2006 Kalmar Art and Light festival 2005 Sydosten, Kalmar 2005 Konsthallen Mörbylånga Collobration projects. (selection) 2010 Informal Studio visits at Umeå Art Academy, iniciated with Joakim Hansson 2007 Dataspels gruppen. Art & Games group, exhibition at Bildmuseumet Umeå with Olof Broström, Carl-Erik Engqvist, John Huntington, Anders Johansson, Ida Röden & Per-Arne Sträng// MOON Experience room Installation at Open House Umeå Art Academy, with Rasmus West 2002 Monks Shaved Tonsure heads, In collaboration with Jens Evaldsson, Öland
Karin Meissner b. 1980 in Nybro, Sweden Lives and works in Stockholm karin@meissner.se// www.karinmeissner.com Education 2006-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2003-06 Konstskolan Idun Lovén, Stockholm Exhibitions 2010 The Junction to Everywhere, MFA Solo show, Galleri 60 Bildmuseet, Umeå// Enterprise: ready to embark on bold new adventures, Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm// The Fiction Project, Brooklyn Art Library, New York 2009 Anonyme Zeichner n 10, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin// Tourist Attraction, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin// Light Club, Bildmuseet, Umeå 2008 Växelverkan, Växjö Konsthall// Helt plötsligt är vi här/Suddenly we are here, Galleri 60e/Cave, Detroit
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Sebastian Mügge b. 1981 in Bonn, Germany Lives and works in Umeå, Sweden bamseone@mail.com// www.flickr.com/asemue
Vida Mehri b. 1984 in Tehran, Iran Lives and works in Umeå, Sweden a_galia@yahoo.com// www.saatchionline.com/vidaliza Education 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2002-07 Bachelor of Architecture (BS), Azad University of Art and Architecture (Tehran Central Branch), Tehran, Iran Exhibitons Solo shows 2011 Librairie Ouvrir L`oeil Bookshop/Gallery, Lyon, France // Galley 60, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden// Solo show in collaboration with Blanka Amezkua in public spaces in Athens, Greece (3///3...three walls on Wednesdays...) 2008 (Video Installation) Mehrin Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran Group shows 2011 Galleri Andersson Sandström, Stockholm, Sweden// Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden// Drawing biennale in Imam Ali Museum, Tehran, Iran 2010 Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden// Umeå academy of Fine Art (Open House), Umeå, Sweden 2009 drawing exhibition in Iran Artists Organization (Khaneh HonarmandanTehran), Iran// Drawing biennale in Pardis culture complex, Tehran, Iran, summer 2008 Art Expo, Tehran 2006 drawing exhibition in Mehrin Gallery, Tehran, Iran Other Activities: 2007-09 Worked as a volunteer in Shush Children House NGO for Homeless Street and working children as a painting and pottery teacher, Tehran, Iran 2007 Organizer of street and working childrens’ painting exhibition in Mehrin Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran
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Education 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2009 BFA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2008 Student exchange program in Vilnius, Lithuania (ERASMUS) 2006-08 Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2005-06 Östra Grevie folkhögskola (art school, preparation class, painting), Sweden Exhibitions Solo show 2010 After 5 Years of Holiday, Gallery 60, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden Group shows 2011 Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden// Galleri Andersson Sandström, Stockholm, Sweden 2010 Springexhibition at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts// Enterprise, Wip:konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden// Galerie Gerken, Berlin, Germany 2009 Light Club, Galleri 60, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden// Tourist Attraction, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany 2008 Wild Wild East, Academy of Fine Arts, Vilnius, Lithuania 2007 International Poster Art II, Rome, Italy// Open House, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts// Street vs. Art, Kunsthistorisches Institut, University of Bonn, Germany 2006 Stockholms Auktionsverk, Malmö, Sweden// International Poster Art I, Rome, Italy// Blanc, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts Scholarships/Grants 2007-2010 AAA Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden 2006 Östra Grevie Folkhögskolas scholarship Representation Galerie Gerken, Berlin, Germany
Thomas Olsson b. 1972 in Söderhamn, Sweden Lives and works in Umeå and Stockholm osseosse@hotmail.com// www.thomasolsson.nu Education 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2006-09 BFA, Academy of fine art, Umeå, Sweden 2005-06 Ölands art school, Öland Sweden 2004-05 KV-art school Göteborg, Sweden 2003-04 Ölands school of design, Öland, Sweden 1997-98 Industry plumber, Helsingborg, Sweden 1988-92 Plumber, Söderhamn/Katrineholm, Sweden Exhibitions Solo show 2011 I Must Play, G 60, bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden Group shows 2010 Enterprise, Wip: Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden// Spring salon, Skellefteå konsthall, Sweden 2009 10 little houses, Stenungsund, Sweden// Tourist Attraction, Bethanien, Berlin, Germany// Light Club, G 60, Bildmuseet, Umeå Sweden// SuperMarket, Galleri Verkligheten, Stockholm, Sweden// Vårsalongen, Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden 2008 Filten, Gallery 60e, Umeå, Sweden// Kappsäck till amerika, Cave, Detroit, USA// Coloring the north, Verkligheten Umeå, Sweden 2007 Open house, Akademi of fine art, Umeå, Sweden 2006 White, Akademi of fine art, Umeå, Sweden// Open house, Akademi of fine art, Umeå, Sweden 2005 Art night, Ölands art school, Öland, Sweden 2003 Art night, Ölands school of design, Öland, Sweden Employment 1997-2003 Garantirör i Helsingborg AB. Sweden, 1988-96 Söderhamns rör och svets AB. Sweden, Books and Publications 2008 Filten, Umeå, Sweden// Coloring the north, Verkligheten, Umeå, Sweden// Catalog, Högskoleverket, Stockholm, Sweden
Helena Piippo Larsson b. 1981 in Västerås, Sweden Lives and works in Umeå and Stockholm helena@piippolarsson.se//www.piippolarsson.se Education 2009-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2006-09 BFA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2004-06 Konstskolan Paletten, Konst & Media 2001 Spéos, Paris Photographic Institute, Exhibitons 2011 Ung - västmanländsk film, Västmanlands Läns Museum// Girls on film, Västmanlands Läns Museum// Återvändare #1, Temporart, Västerås 2010 Modern Love 2, Temporart, Västerås, Sweden Årets Sverigefinska Konstnär, Studio, Tampere// Enterprise, Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm// Vårutställning, Umeå Konsthögskola// Vårsalongen, Skellefteå Konsthall 2009 Stipendiat 2009, Västerås Konstnärsförening// Tourist Attraction, Bethanien, Berlin// Light Club, Galleri 60, Bildmuseet Umeå// Simple Encounters, Norrköpings Stadsmuseum, // Supermarket, Clarion Hotel Stockholm// Vårsalongen, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm 2008 Colouring the north, Verkligheten, Umeå// MADE, Norrlandsoperan, Umeå // Vårsalongen, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm
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Rasmus West b. 1979 in Pietarsaari, Finland. Living in Umeå, Sweden rasmusart@gmail.com// rasmuswest.com Education 2006-11 MA, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden 2004-06 Östra Grevie Folkhögskola, aesthetics, painting. 1998 Evening studies in Art Science, Åbo akademi. 1999-02 Borgå school of arts and crafts, graphic design. Exhibitons Solo shows 2011 Galleri 60, Bildmuséet, Umeå Selected groupshows 2011 MA exhibition, Bildmuséet, Umeå // MA exhibition, Galleri Andersson/Sandström, Stockholm 2010 Is There Any Hope For an Optimistic Art?, MMoMA / Qui Vive? Biennial, Moscow // Enterprise Wip:Konsthall, Stockholm 2009 Tourist Attraction, Projektraum im Bethanien, Kreuzberg, Berlin// Bachelor’s exam exhibition, G60, Bildmuseet, Umeå
Alexander Svartvatten b. 1978 in Stockholm, Sweden Lives and works in Umeå, Sweden alexander@interplay.nu// www.interplay.nu Education Master in Arts is a shared degree from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, 2011 and Bergen National Academy of the Arts, 2008. Exhibitons Solo shows Verkligheten Gallery// Alva Gallery// Pictura Gallery// Gallery 60// The Umeå City Library. Films screenings Kasseler DokFest// Crosstalk Video Art Festival, Budapest// Umeå Film Festival. Group shows Kiasma, Helsinki during ARS 06// The Norrland Operahouse// Verftet, Bergen
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Selected Performances 2010 Is There Any Hope For an Optimistic Art?, MMoMA / Qui Vive? Biennial, Moscow // After Forever, Galerie Im Regierundsviertel / Forgotten Bar Project, Berlin// Den nya punkten, Högkvarteret, Stockholm 2009 LUR Performancefestival, Hammenhög// Blandband, Galleri Syster, Luleå // Leif Performancefestival, Luleå// Den nya punkten, Umeå 2008 Made-festival, Norrlandsoperan, Umeå 2007 Made-festival, Norrlandsoperan, Umeå Initiatives/Cooperations 2010 Weld Way out West, 5 day roadtrip and performance at Atalante, during Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival, together with Anna Koch, Ingrid Cogne, Sybrig Dokter and Rudi Skotheim Jensen 2009 Neue Punkt (swedish: Den Nya Punkten), a workgroup for interdisciplinary performance in Umeå Grants J.C Kempes minnesfond, research funds Umeå Art academy / Umeå University, artistic development funds — for performance in Moscow Work and related 2010 Short term Assistant to Francois Bucher / research //Short term Assistant to Melati Suryodarmo / assistant director Weld residence
Artists Elin Bruun-Nystedt Elin Elfström Sana Ghobbeh Tetyana Goryushina Helya Honar Eskil Karl Liepa Karin Meissner Vida Mehri Sebastian Mügge Thomas Olsson Helena Piippo Larsson Alexander Svartvatten Rasmus West Curator and Editor Celia Prado Professor Elin Wikström Design Jobbajobba Design Minja Smajic, Art Director Sara Duell, Graphic Designer www.jobbajobba.com Print Publikum, Belgrade 2011 Paper GardaPat 13 Kiara, 115g Fonts Narziss and Interstate ISSN 1653-6185 ISBN 978-91-978914-1-7 www.art.umu.se
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Exhibiton May 7th –May 22rd 2011 BildMuseet Umeå, Gammlia
BildMuseet Opening hours Tues-Sat 12–16 Sun 12–17 Mon closed www.bildmuseet.umu.se info@bildmuseet.umu.se
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Master of Fine Arts 201 1 Umeå Academy of Fine Arts Exhibition at Bildmuseet Umeå May 7 th – May 22 nd 201 1
Elin Bruun-Nystedt Elin Elfström Sana Ghobbeh Tetyana Goryushina Helya Honar Eskil Liepa Vida Mehr Karin Meissner Sebastian Mügge Thomas Olsson Helena Piippo Larsson Alexander Svartvatten Rasmus West