CULTURAL CAPITAL by Andreas Knag-Danielsen

C u lt u r a l C a p i ta l

www.cultural-capital.tumblr.com

C u lt u r a l C a p i ta l

MFA exhibition 2014 Umeå Academy of Fine Arts May 3rd – May 18th 2014 Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden May 30th – June 5th 2014 ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik),

Curator Viktor Neumann Professor Florian Zeyfang Artists Lars Brink Wenche Crusell Mark Frygell Jonas Gazell Anna Johansson Ingrid Klintskog Jens Lindqvist Camilla Lundquist Chris Magnusson Ida Persson Jaqueline Shabo Madelaine Sillfors Matti Sumari Fabian Tholin

C u lt u r a l C a p i ta l

Berlin, Germany

8 - 11 C U L T U R A L C A P I T A L – C U LT U R A L P O L I C I E S Viktor Neumann 12 - 15 Y O U R C A P I TA L An assemblage by Florian Zeyfang 16 - 17 A n d d iversity is t h e h ome of art Roland Spolander 21 - 105 A rtists 108 - 111 CVs 113 Imprint

C U LT U R A L C A P I TA L â&#x20AC;&#x201C; C U LT U R A L P O L I C I E S Viktor Neumann

As the invited curator for the graduation exhibitions of the 2014 MFA class of the UmeĂĽ Academy of Fine Arts I have had the opportunity to visit the university and their fourteen graduates under professor Florian Zeyfang periodically over a time frame of around nine months. Getting selected by a group of artists based on previous curatorial approaches and outcomes can be seen as a rather refreshing shift within the often-hierarchical selection processes and dynamics between artists and curators. Much has been written about the tasks and chances of curating an exhibition within an art-educational context and working with a group of artists tied to little more than the coincidence of them finishing their institutional education at the same place and time. The significant differences between the specificities of the graduation show viktor neumann and the thematically defined group show, which often has a pre-determined context is the potential for fundamental openness, one that creates new readings and connections. The establishment of a basic common-ground towards an inclusive collaboration with artists, informed by recurring individual studio visits and collective group discussions, defines questions rather then tries to answer them, thereby keeping open speculation for other ways of thinking and doing. As a starting point for our common investigations within the given structural framework we looked at cultural policies and its surrounding codifications. The need to unfold oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own conditions was the initial starting point that led us to investigate the concept of cultural capital, as defined by prescient sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.1 This polymorphic, supple and adaptable concept was an attempt to expand the category of capital as non-financial social asset that promotes social mobility beyond

economic means. This relational concept, held in conjunction with the other declared forms of economic, social and symbolic capital, is often still applied to concerns with continual transmission and accumulation in ways that perpetuate social inequalities and constitute advantage and disadvantage in society. Bourdieu distinguishes between three intervened subtypes; the embodied, objectified and institutionalised cultural capital. The former two refer to behavioural and material properties that often originate in family structures, while the latter consists of institutional recognition,

and adapted by labour markets as qualitative and quantitative measurement. By critically examining the concept, on both a theoretical and a personal level, we addressed how cultural capital acts as a social relation within a system of exchange and how that includes the accumulated cultural knowledge conferring power and status, but also feeling the necessity to extend the concept to additional categories such as gender and race. By exploring the impact of cultural capital in relation to other forms of capital, refracted through the very own biographies and living conditions, the notion of experienced and perceived advantages and disadvantages in relation to the

viktor neumann

most often prominent in the form of academic credentials or qualifications absorbed

given or achieved cultural capital became central to the discussion. Detached from its neoliberal utilisations, cultural capital can be understood as a potential for action, reaction and interaction in any given social field, both individually and collectively. On each level of critical examination undertaken we followed the belief that cultural policies cannot be treated satisfactorily in isolation from the wider economic and political determinations operating upon culture and society 1

â&#x20AC;&#x201C; especially within our period of epochal change and complexity

Bourdieu, Pierre:

associated with key terms such as Postmodernism, Post-Fordism,

The Forms of Capital,

Post-internet or global culture. The issues are international, but

in J.G. Richardson

there are local and national specificities that require close at-

(Ed.): Handbook of

tention: ones that are strongly entwined within concepts of the

Theory and Research

public sphere. Indeed, there is no single public sphere to which

for the Sociology of

we all have access and in which we all participate equally and at

Education, New York

best, is fragmented, multiple and diverse in its manifestations. Re-

1986, pp. 241â&#x20AC;&#x201C;258.

lating to our own conditions, the students have described their

relationship with the public of Umeå and their position in its public sphere as marked by ambiguity. Referred to as the feeling of both a forced and chosen isolation, the feelings were marked by the need for public recognition and its counterpoint, and the feeling of lack of empathy towards one’s training as an artist placed against the lack of productive responses towards this incomprehension. On another level we have explored the transformations of the academy itself, the move to the newly built art campus, the current period with a new head of department yet to be selected, the changes within grading systems leaning towards neoliberal comparability. The state of uncertainty has been widely discussed and parallels have been drawn to the current altering status of the artists present at Umeå. Yet the unknown future of an art student who embodies the hopes of artistic development after leaving the security of an institutionalised environment, does so with increasing awareness of – to mention a few – the limited chances of public recognition of their work and the fears of a precarious lifestyle. The ambiguity towards the artists’ role in the public sphere has found its climax in our investigations of the local surroundings of the city of Umeå, which is currently one of two selected European Capitals of Culture 2014. In its tradition since 1985, the European Capital of Culture programme has become the highest profile European Union sponsored cultural event, often becoming a catalyst for the transformation of the selected cities’ urban planning strategies. Yet, the institution of viktor neumann

the Capital of Culture is being reviewed in a rather critical manner: the evaluation of the previous years has oscillated between being an event of empty symbolic importance driven by local marketing and tourism

numbers and a goal towards actual long-term change. Often it

Ernst, Thomas/

has been mentioned that the regional image cultivated is com-

Heimböckel,

parable to the 18th Century competitions held between nations

Dieter: Verortungen

and regions and has weakened the idea of a ‘devoted’ Europe. It

der Interkulturalität.

is the economising and instrumentalising of culture as marketing

Die Europäischen

tool, establishing gentrification rather than sustainability for the

Kulturhauptstädte

cultural sphere or even an Eurocentric view of dampened oth-

Luxemburg und die

erness, which draws parallels to the developments of expansion

Großregion (2007),

versus dissolving borders. While, antithetically, tendencies of sepa-

das Ruhrgebiet (2010)

ratism and re-established borders, both within Europe and beyond,

und Istanbul (2010),

reflect the current shifting views of European migration politics.2

Bielefeld 2012.

It is too early to evaluate Umeå's performance as the Capital Culture, however the amount of critical voices in newspaper articles and blogs are distinctive: Though the self-depicted goals of Umeå's agenda to achieve a culture driven by growth are decidedly exclusive from suggestions and contributions from the public. The fear of exploiting subcultures, increasing class inequality due to segregation and the lack of sustainability in both cultural and social fields are topics widely discussed. The drastic architectural and infrastructural developments tend to further privatise, and have been mainly agreed without any public dialogue or debate. The consolidation between municipality and private real-estate companies has

recently been a source of protest, as in the widely discussed ‘Cultural Fabric’ building which is currently under construction. It is a rather unique joint venture between public and private sectors, bringing together amongst others the city's library and hotels. This raises a number of matters concerning the role of artists and their relation to the public sphere. The artist Andrea Fraser analysed the institution as specific sites for inquiry, highlighting how individuals conceive the social field through the institution as a construction; thereby complicating what can be termed inside and what is outside.3 In response to this aggregate, the class created a fictitious persona named Emma Thu – playing with the homophone of their academic year ‘MA 2’ – as an umbrella for various formulations to create not fixed works, but rather intervene in situations connected to the public sphere. For example, Emma Thu reacted to the demolishing of the Apberget, which can be roughly translated as ‘monkey mountain’. The Apberget was formerly located at the town hall square as a sort of speakers

viktor neumann

corner, a public space of expression, a symbol for freedom of speech often used

for meetings or as starting point for demonstrations. As the town hall square has been transformed during preparations for the Capital of Culture year, Apberget was demolished to supply water pipes for the newly build shopping mall with its cynical name Utopia. As a reaction to the demolishment Emma Thu has build a self-made, provisional ‘monkey mountain’ which then was placed directly next to the Utopia mall. Inscribing its badge with the engraved sentence ‘A gift to Umeå municipality from Emma Thu’ the intervention is a serious contribution to the 3

protests against the demolishment and due to its specifically self-

Fraser, Andrea:

made aesthetic a playful wink towards the amount of public and

From the Critique of

private money consumed for the appearance of the city. Certainly

Institutions to an

it can be read as a proposal to reflect on the potentials of what

Institution of Critique,

is known as self-empowerment. The forthcoming exhibitions will

in: Artforum, Vol. 44,

pursue the already established dialogue between the artists and

Sep. 2005,

the public sphere, while further reflecting on their role in the

pp. 278–285.

social field, cautious of their perceived cultural capital.

Y O U R C A P I TA L An assemblage by Florian Zeyfang

I am your capital. I guess you are kind of curious as to what I am, but I am one of the things that do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.

your capital

If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer. That is my name. Perhaps it was raining very hard. That is my name.

Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong – ‘Sorry for the mistake’ – and you had to do something else. That is my name.

Perhaps it was a game that you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were sitting in a chair surfing the Internet. That is my name.

That is my name.

your capital

Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around you.

Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near to you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel it before it happened. Then it happened. That is my name. Or you heard someone calling from a great distance. Their voice was almost an echo. That is my name.

Perhaps you were laying in bed, almost ready to go to sleep, and you laughed at something, a joke unto yourself, a good way to end your day. That is my name. Or you were eating something good and for a second forgot what you were eating, but still went on, knowing it was good. That is my name.

your capital

Perhaps it was around midnight and the snow fell like a white curtain. That is my name.

Or you felt bad when someone said that thing to you. They could have told it to someone else, somebody that was more familiar with their problems. That is my name.

Perhaps you had borrowed that book from Richard Brautigan, before you were on the way to the airport, and you read it, and you found that these were the sentences you were looking for. That is my name. Or you had asked for some images that would describe what I would be, and you received them just in time.

Perhaps the char swam in the pool and the river was wide and outside the window, there were swans flying over its dark blue surface. That is my name.

your capital

That is my name.

And I wish this and all else will matter.

Contributors, images: Lars Brink, Wenche Crusell, Mark Frygell, Jonas Gazell, Anna Johansson, Ingrid Klintskog, Andreas Knag-Danielsen, Jens Lindqvist, Camilla Lundquist, Chris Magnusson, Viktor Neumann, Ida Persson, Jaqueline Shabo, Madelaine Sillfors, Matti Sumari, Fabian Tholin, Michel Thomas, Boas Yiftach, Florian Zeyfang; text: Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar (1968), Florian Zeyfang.

A n d d iversity is t h e h ome of art Roland Spolander Head of department 2000 - 2013, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts.

Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a huge boulder up a hill to the top, only to watch it roll back down again, propelled by its own weight. Sisyphus was compelled to roll the boulder back up the hill again and so on. Sisyphus illustrates the absurdity of being confronted with our own everyday repetitions, and how the eagerness to instrumentalise every task is not that different from the myth of Sisyphus or, more precisely, the ‘reality’ of Sisyphus. Albert Camus, in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus imagined that Sisyphus was happy, and did not find the world, the work or the task meaningless or vain. Sisyphus challenges the gods’ power by ceaselessly moving his boulder. ‘Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, R o l a n d S POLAND E R

in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ How to understand this happiness that Camus finds in the myth of Sisyphus? Is the boulder an action and subject, like Sisyphus himself? Do we hear an ongoing, variable encounter between subjects, which we recognise with our imagination when we hear the story? Is the boulder's faith that Sisyphus will never abandon his task reaffirmed with each trip up the hill? Is Sisyphus’s happiness nourished by this fellowship of trust, giving him the strength to continue whatever obstacles he encounters every time he rolls the boulder upward again – not unlike the work of the artist. Indeed it is the sentence, ‘Diversity is the home of art’, drawn from this essay that provokes the problem of whether Camus is rationalising, or even overthrowing, the power of artistic diversity. Could such a ‘home’, a place of comprehensibility, allow us to think of diversity as if it were a substance to be wielded, moulded and sold. After all, art is often chided, or even ridiculed, by the problem of whether it is socially useful – a phenomenon that can all-too-quickly be assimilated into ‘economic’ circuits, to be imported and exported like any other commodity. Hannah Wilke constantly questioned existence as well as essence in her performance art. For her, movement was the difference between life and death. And no repetition of movement was possible, every movement lived in the now of the individual. Art and life merged. ‘Every gesture is different: just as people in the world are different. My folded clay pieces are like little pieces of nature, a new species. They exist the way seashells exist. They also have to do with using a single gesture to turn a flat surface into a three-dimensional form. It is the kind of art that is made in a

second. One doesn’t have to belabor it. We are all made in a second, too, a second of pleasure.’ In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said that ‘aesthetics is the mother of ethics’, claiming art as an autonomous activity distinct from the realities of the day. Art distinguishes itself from the rest of life by resisting repetition, In art, this kind of reproductive activity is called mannerism. According to Brodsky, art always moves forward. ‘Art’, he writes, ‘is a recoilless weapon,’ continually giving birth, creating not recreating. The present is where the art college of Umeå is. Always has been. For an art school is a home of diversity, synonymous with each piece and project of each student, no more and no less. No central authority can dictate what is to be given shape. Each individual is personally responsible for his or her work and everyone at the school, students, technicians, administrators, teachers, curators and guests together create the real, dynamic energy of the aesthetic space in a perpetually pulsating flow. The now. The art departments, art schools, galleries and museums, artistic societies, all actors in the ‘institutional aesthetic field’, are dependent on the creative gesture of the artist. This year, ‘2014’, coincides with Umeå (and Riga) charged with the task of representing ‘European Capital of Culture’ by the European Union. What happens when in the future will no longer be an activity but rather a memory? In a story shaped by language, anything can become a building block or boulder. If it does not fit effortlessly, language can be used as an instrument to incorporate the least suitable pieces so that even they seem deposed with an apparent self-certainty that can make a believer out of a skeptic. Once again, a dismissal of diversity to the home of unity. As Hélène Cixous writes so stunningly about the artistic process, ‘There is no end to writing or drawing. Being born doesn't end. Drawing is being born. Drawing is born.’

R o l a n d S POLAND E R

2014 becomes part of the language, a unifying symbol of the city of Umeå, a term that

22 - 27 Lars Brink 28 - 33 Wenche Crusell 34 - 39 Mark Frygell 40 - 45 Jonas Gazell 46 - 51 Anna Johansson 52 - 57 Ingrid Klintskog 58 - 63 Jens Lindqvist 64 - 69 Camilla Lundquist 70 - 75 Chris Magnusson 76 - 81 Ida Persson 82 - 87 Jaqueline Shabo 88 - 93 Madelaine Sillfors 94 - 99 Matti Sumari 100 - 105 Fabian Tholin

L ars brink

Lars Brink

b. 1982, Stockholm, Sweden www.larsbrink.com

Fortyfour: ‘Way back when I was in a few introductory to visual studies (i.e. sketching) classes and some of our first assignments after we deconstructed all our previously “learned” techniques and started from scratch with blind contour drawings, we were given the task of choosing a famous painting or drawing and required to reproduce it or a portion of it to the “T”. The point isn't in the actual reproduction for reproductions sake, but rather the deconstruction of the methods and techniques employed by the original artist. I recall choosing Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari for one of them where we had to reproduce a 4x4 square of the original. The painting is lost, but many of the preparatory sketches remain, which was the work's appeal to me. The point to the exercise was to explore the techniques, and with repetition, the mastery of those techniques so you could begin to explore new paths and explorations. BasiL ars brink

cally learn the technique and then apply it in a different methodology in the hopes of creating something new. Getting back to my 4x4 square, it was a far cry from the original, but the process of reproducing that piece, really laid a lot of ground work for many of my future 2D and 3D explorations, techniques and methodology. Many of which I use to date as they have been honed over countless hours of practice. If they say “Lars” is an art student, I see where he is going with this. But let’s remember: whether he is a student or not, he has an intention with the work and it demands the viewer to view it within the confines of the artist's intention. The focus is not in the 100% authentic reproduction with regard to the techniques of constructing the original. He’s looking to reproduce the iconic visual clues of the original. The reproduction he produced is merely a vehicle to a broader discussion. His copy, which at first glance, appears to be identical to the icon, but upon closer inspection it is apparent it is definitely not. Which then brings into sharp focus exactly what he goes on to explain via his website. And he’s done a fine job of eliciting responses which are completely laid bare in this thread by many of the contributors. I would go as far to say some sound completely offended. I would not say this is completely in line with Warhol’s reproduction of 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, but it’s along the same vein: What is art? Where is the line between commercial goods and art? Can something commercially made be considered art? Warhol offended many through his work. The Laser is three-dimensional but executed for the same effect. Icon chosen. Visual identity deconstructed. Elicit a response from the viewer.’

The Blog, 2013-14. Screenshot from

L ars brink

www.laserbuildingprocess.wordpress.com.

SCULPTURE (Cinelli Laser Crono Strada), 2013-14. Mixed media. 105 x 168 x 46 cm.

Commercial Identity (Souvenirs of Desire), 2014. Inkjet print. 60 x 49 cm.

This is an extract from an internet thread on velocipedesalon.com. It is a forum for bike enthusiasts and bike builders. Kristofer Henry is a professional frame builder and owner of the bike shop 44bikes (44bikes.com) who, under the alias Fortyfour, is one of the members on this forum. In this online thread there have been several discussions about my projects, specifically about a sculpture that I have created and about my blog which is about the building process of this sculpture. Henry continues with thoughts about techniques and tools, believing that to really explore something new it is of great benefit if the implements do not become a barrier between you and your ideas. Henry elaborates on ‘the doing’ and its importance: ‘Maybe even more important, the concept can have more time to be realised because the act of making the object is not really a chore. Tools and techniques become an extension. New methods can be happened upon as well…’ His thoughts and arguments are something I can strongly relate to, as it is through the ‘doing’ and the process where I find my greatest desires. Although not all aspects and layers of my project are brought up on this online forum, I believe that it is crucial to emphasise how process is a vital aspect of my work. Also, I think that others’ opinions – especially those from outside the art world – provide new insights to my work. The joy of problem solving was one of the greatest aspects that arose during the making of this project; my desire is nourished by a bottomless well of questions trying to find answers. When I slide around the workshop without much knowledge of welding, brazing, sawing, making blueprints, I find myself in a world of possibilities. L ars brink

To read the whole thread visit: www.velocipedesalon.com/forum/f2/simply-amazing-35667.html

"The Auction", 2014.

L ars brink

Exhibition view: Galleriet, Ume책.

eBay, 2014. Screenshot of ad on www.ebay.com.

Commercial Identity (Souvenirs of Desire), 2014. T-Shirt, mug, key ring. Dimensions variable.

W e n c h e C r u se l l

Wenche Crusell

b. 1987, Gotland, Sweden www.wenchecrusell.com

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. I don’t much care where – Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.’ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 ‘Down, down, down’ it continues after the first few lines of Lewis Carroll's novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Indeed it is Alice’s curiosity to chase a white rabbit that infamously leads her to jump ‘down a rabbit-hole’ without any consideration of what to expect, or how to get out of it again. Wonderland – a place in a different sphere and of different logic and structure – becomes a site of ‘terra ignota’, the Latin term W e n c h e C r u se l l

for ‘unknown land’ used in cartography for regions that have not yet been mapped or documented and metaphorically used to describe an unexplored subject or field of research still to be translated. Terra Ignota is the title of Wenche Crusells latest solo exhibition and defines the core matter of her explorations. Her polymorphic works vary in their choice of medium, though most prominently she works with mixed-media installation, sculpture, collage and video. Crusell reacts spatially to the situation she finds herself in, creating site-specific immersive installations. One finds recurring elements – the shape of a tent, pendulums and shiny black surfaces – while Crusell’s usage of materials are fuelled with vanitas symbolism, such as bones, rotten wood or hair. The angular compositions she arranges suggest tools or traces and sites of undefined rituals applied in belief systems that oscillate between associations such as religion, spiritualism, occultism, further alchemy or the self inflicted expansion of consciousness. It feels rather impossible to isolate single elements of the installation, and little it seems intended to. Structures and shapes find their traces repeatedly implied, while shadows of sculptures continue their patterns and transform themselves into drawings; hitting partly a wall, partly another work, marking their bonds, dissolving a division between materialised work and presentation. One encounters the installations like stepping on a stage-set filled with fictitious yet mystic artefacts, all playfully alternating between symbolisms of multiple means. Immediately, the search for finding the connecting dots begins, as if there is a riddle to solve. But even if there would be some sort of

"TERRA IGNOTA", 2013.

W e n c h e C r u se l l

Exhibition view: Galleriet, Ume책.

The Guru, 2012. Mixed media. 30 x 20 x 15 cm.

Systems of belief #1, 2014. Mixed media. 280 x 280 x 265 cm.

resolution we are deliberately dissuaded to find it. The staged settings are precisely planned in their appearance and leave an opening towards diverse readings or alleged narratives, already by choice of movement and interaction with the installation. Yet, the physical engagement shifts to one of imagination, touching fields of individual, collective or media-transported memories. Crusell reveals the subjective and fragmented, carving up the imaginative realm and the concept of reality into a continuous debate with rational and irrational preconceptions that display matter as catalyst for multidimensional perceptions. Alice's adventures end with her awakening on her sisterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lap, telling her about her explorations before gleefully running off. For a moment, the reader is left alone with her sister pondering about the events down the rabbit-hole. Something very similar happens experiencing Crusells works, it is that feeling of limbo between the realms of the known and the unknown. Viktor Neumann

W e n c h e C r u se l l

Tribe of monkeys, 2013.

W e n c h e C r u se l l

Collage. 29 x 21 cm.

TERRA IGNOTA (element nr.1), 2013. Mixed media. Apx. 550 x 500 x 5 cm.

Systems of belief #1, 2014 (detail). Mixed media. 280 x 280 x 265 cm.

M a r k F R Y G E LL

Mark Frygell

b. 1985, Umeå, Sweden www.markfrygell.se

Although he has been known to try his hand at drawing, stick-and-poke tattoos, fanzines, installations and found objects, Mark Frygell is primarily a painter. Frygell’s dedication to his practice may seem slightly idiosyncratic and out of place, coming at a time when painting is often marginalised in contemporary discourse, but it is precisely the idiosyncratic, marginal and personal which holds a central place in his work. By exploring the limits and possibilities of interpersonal communication, Frygell asks how the personal and the subjective can be shared between the artist and the viewer and between the artist and the world. Frygell’s painting has slowly evolved from the directness of what might be termed abstract symbolism toward more expressionistic, figurative motifs. His work characteristically uses ‘empty signifiers’ – signs that present themselves as ‘signs’, but like M a r k F R Y G E LL

made-up words do not obviously and unambiguously point to a specific concept or object. The viewer may see Frygell’s forceful and urgent deployment of these ‘empty signifiers’ as hovering in an inscrutable space of drift, unintelligibility or resistance, but by shifting these perspectives Frygell serves to foreground the participatory relation between artist, artwork and viewer. From this, a set of questions presents itself: Has the artist imbued the painting with a story that is too personal or too intellectually obscure or, indeed, too archetypical and familiar for us to see? Or, is the image a space where we assign meaning because we cannot help but make associations when looking? Frygell’s more recent works explore the unstable relation between the invitation to interpret and the uncertainty that emerges from these interpretations. His paintings have gradually come to contain the stuff of pre-modernist Western art – be they fleshy, wingless cherub bodies that seem to be wrestling, a still life whose symbolism of baroque excess seeps into the technical aspects of the work and is transformed with saturated colour and finger-deep layering or an icon-like painting of a slightly cross-eyed and tired Christ. Frygell appropriates and distorts motifs from art history – or what we might remember from a rainy afternoon we spent in an art museum – however they seem to be connected in a way that cannot easily be pieced into a narrative. We see the historical reference, but Frygell does not supply us with an obvious basis for interpretation. Instead, there seems to be a personal dimension in

"Life is Life", 2013.

M a r k F R Y G E LL

Exhibition view: Galleriet, Ume책.

All this and more, 2013. Oil on canvas. 112 x 112 cm.

The Troubled Draftsman, 2014. Installation, mixed media. Dimensions variable.

his appropriation of these motifs, one that invariably leads to a compulsive filling in of this gap by looking for something to base these wandering subjective interpretations upon. There is also a tangible tendency of the grotesque in Frygell’s works, figurative or non-figurative, in both form and content. The noisy explosiveness and ‘brutalist’ character of DIY hardcore punk aesthetics is referenced with a combination of directness and obscurity. After all, the punk aesthetic is a means of rudimentary mass-communication, emerging from a fringe movement. Like Frygells works, the confrontational slogans, over-exposed images, conspicuous logos and iconic symbols are ostensibly insistent enough, but the message communicated is seldom intended to seriously pierce the social fabric. However, there is an unmistakable moment in Frygell’s art when the brutality of its expression becomes strikingly comical. Some of Frygell’s works emphasise the tension between the urgency with which they are executed and the comic overstatement that this engenders. The comical element, though emerging only occasionally and in contrast to darker motifs and moods, to some extent bridges the communicative gap that otherwise dominate Frygell’s aesthetic programme, since it elicits and anticipates a certain reaction in the viewer. The combination of the grotesque and comic is most obvious in a recent series of drawings with suggestive titles like Middle-class hang out after work and Romantic comedy. These depict mostly male bodies, usually naked and balding, engaged in different forms of physical interaction. The comic aspect of these M a r k F R Y G E LL

works tends towards the obscene and vulgar. It is accompanied by an unmistakable darkness, which emerges from the disturbing combination of references to human isolation and companionship, tenderness and abuse. Nicklas Hållén

Buckle up, 2013.

M a r k F R Y G E LL

Framed drawings. 60 x 32 cm.

Pizza Nr. 57, 2013. Oil on canvas. 118 x 118 cm.

The Troubled Draftsman, 2014 (detail). Installation, mixed media. Dimensions variable.

Jonas gazell

Jonas Gazell

b. 1979, Stockholm, Sweden www.jonasgazell.com

Technology, ethics and utopia: on the works by Jonas Gazell The technical objects Gazell works with are those of his childhood and adolescence. They were the nature of his childhood. They were absolutely natural. Making them a recurrent motif of his later artwork can be seen at least partly as a desperate nostalgic act – not of a personal but of universal importance – yes, we can nowadays search for the old forms of technical objects with our memories encapsulated in and attached to them as desperately as Proust once was searching for the ‘involuntary memory’ of his childhood – which for him was connected with the taste of madeleine cake. Today’s TV-and-electronics-childhood is not so much about our personal memories as it is about all those multiple technological devices that form and develop these Jonas gazell

memories and that are now inseparable from our personality and corporeality, serving as countless useful body extensions, providing us with material for emotions and feelings, with images for memory etc. Thus we may question the very strict and rigid juxtaposition of ‘nature’ and ‘technology’ we are used to. We are now embedded into technology as well as our ancestors earlier were embedded into nature – techne (τέχνη) has become virtually inseparable from physis (φύσις). But by asserting that technology is something natural we refuse to interrogate it about its own nature – for ‘natural’ for us means something that goes as such and needs no thinking. We don’t know that, but we are using technology. We prefer it to be ‘instant’, invisible, omnipresent. But this is a magical treatment – in magic the ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ questions never matter, it is only the effect that is important. Make a ritual and rains will fall. Push the button and everything will be done. Technological development may even seem to be a process with its own logic, uncontrolled by any external forces: we would like to slow down its rate but we do not know how and it goes on, trying to reach the perfection of technology in a process of permanent and automatic improvements… From this vantage Gazell is trying to find an emergency break in order to pull it in an act of extreme responsibility and concentration and to address all of us with a single question: aren’t we going to a point when and where it will all end in tears? By changing the context of perception of technical objects Gazell creates the background from which the addressing of technology can be fulfilled. It happens precisely because of the very fact of reading of Gazell’s installations – all inhabited by outdated although fully functional devices, that were thrown into garbage bins by their former

It Will Al End In Tears, 2014. Dimensions variable.

Jonas gazell

8 CRT monitors, 8 media players, cable.

Let Out, 2013. 11 CRT Monitors, 11 media players, cable. Dimensions variable.

Complacency Falling, 2014. Cloth, LCD screen, video, loop, stereo. 550 x 109 x 65 cm.

owners – by a visitor from our technological present – our age of speed, surfaces and flat screens. This knowledge of any potential visitor about the state-of-the-art developments in technology is perhaps the most important precondition of reception of his works as well as the biggest proof to the fact that Gazell’s work is oriented towards future through questioning past. Functionality (in a broad meaning of this word) of every TV set resides not in it as in a ‘thing in itself’ but outside it – in all the various economic and social relations this TV set is embedded in. Cutting these external relations and reconfiguring them is an artistic act that is subjected to an attempt to historicize technology. This historicizing includes a project of a specific ‘vision of technology’, according to which all previous evolution of technical object is present in it as part of its being. In this case a TV set is never ‘this’ or ‘that’ TV set, but a unit that is always in a state of becoming. Some stages of this becoming, those that we tend not to notice, can be seen as fundamental parts of Gazell’s artistic projects. By drawing our attention to the past of technology he simultaneously is drawing it to its present. When treating old and neglected machines as human beings Gazell reminds me of a collector – not the old one, who gathered unique objects, but the new one, who charges things with uniqueness, animates them despite objective preconditions. The ethics of treatment of things in our age of planned generations of things with a scheduled lifecycle is of utmost importance. And since all things are essentially ‘the same’ – being assembled on the assembly line – it is this treatment of things that can endow Jonas gazell

them with their personality, animate them. By doing so we refuse to consume, we break the circle of never-ending purchases of ‘new, improved models’ and free ourselves from the logic of consumption that is being imposed on us. Such a concern for our material environment is a practice of freedom, freedom as a form of resistance. And this abovementioned animation of the machines that is felt so profoundly in all of Gazell’s projects is humanity’s another desperate attempt to understand ourselves: when addressing machines as human beings we only admit that they are our transformed forms, there are social relations in them, human skills, human knowledge. And perhaps what underlies every artwork by Gazell is a utopian dream – a dream about a community where such works would be no longer needed, a community understood as a collective bodiliness, community, innervated with technology – the latter understood finally not as a conquest of nature but as a mastering of relations between humanity and nature. This imagined community is a prerequisite for the reading of his works. In such a way his art avoids affirmative character and negates itself, dreaming about its own non-existence in a world of freed humanity and freed technology. This very community can be understood as a realization of those hopes that technology had always brought with itself. TV brought to us images from distant lands just as magic mirrors filled the same niche in fairy tales. But due to the condition in which technology is used it always betrays its promise of happiness, its utopian longing. In Gazell’s installations it is possible to glimpse at this promise one more time. Igor Isychenko

Jonas gazell Transmission Glade, 2013. 8 CRT monitors, 8 media players, wooden fruit crates, bear trap, performer.

Complacency Falling, 2014 (detail). Cloth, LCD screen, video, loop, stereo. 550 x 109 x 65 cm.

A n n a j o h a n ss o n

Anna Johansson

b. 1981, Öland, Sweden www.annajohansson.net

(The Poetics of Cutting) Finally. Maybe I should say, ‘at long last’. I realise, after waiting for something to happen, that there lies no way ahead. The words were already there, objects with specific meanings. It is the meanings that have to be reconstituted. Another way. Maybe the words have to abandon their life as objects and be placed in the blank space to which you usually refer, or at least return, like a question asked with material instead of words. Material that provides the word its meaning on a level that simultaneously sinks or evokes darkness around language itself. I imagine this darkness already exists as an endless, embracing body and that you confront it with the same attentiveness that you give all material, and everything material, around you. It A n n a j o h a n ss o n

is no longer visible or accessible. This is how I thought at first. Before I realised that you treat the darkness the same way as a blank sheet of paper. The impression left by a gesture not only indicates position, a boundary, but also lends the white a bodily presence, like the dark. Of course, I might be wrong. Weight. The specific weight with which the ‘hanging’ populated your studio for a long time, offering resistance to all who would enter. The hanging was made of abandoned lengths of cable from every conceivable electric circuit, telephony, the internet, every kind of connection. Communication, in other words. No citizen left unconnected. You gathered, cut and hung these filaments to sway just above the floor, as if to make the weight of their collective energy assume the semblance of a physical body. Their levitating act was amplified by the visible scars left open by cutting and guillotining the cables. The inner core of the cable, thin metal threads of copper protected by several layers of colourful plastic or rubber insulation. The encapsulated, multicoloured wires dripped from mitred tips like tears – like every cable was a person. And the sculpture a community. Communities always try to avoid weeping. People cannot, however, not without great effort. Spending time in your studio then meant spending time in that body. In that sculpture. External and internal space merged seamlessly. The distance necessary for the gaze to distinguish itself from its surroundings was gone. Eradicated. The hanging offered no image to relate to. An image to ponder like an Aristotle: Is there anything here in which I recognise myself? When I leave the embrace of the sculpture, I remind

Seekers poem, 2013.

A n n a j o h a n ss o n

Installation. Dimensions variable.

The history of Safari, 2011. Video. 02:36 min.

Rigmaroles, 2014. Documentation of performance. Video, 5:34 min., stereo.

myself that the threads were only that: hanging. Nothing else. A place of grief where all meaning fled. Material. This was the sculpture you transformed into a corridor, through which the visitor was compelled to pass at your exhibit at Galleriet. The entrance was both incredibly beautiful and sad at the same time. The appearance of the sculpture was constantly reborn as hands felt their way into the space. A passage that only leaves traces in memory, regardless of how many enter. It makes no note of quantity, only the quality of intelligent emotion. There is no physical confirmation of one's passage. The gallery was dark and the objects, the sculptures, lit with spotlights. In the darkness within, a handmade copper mailbox, a seal cast in bronze, a projection of a man returning to his cave dwelling. The feeling of sound always in movement, one that never strays from the living. The mailbox leans casually abandoned, as if no one had used it in a long time, but the materiality of it carries decay towards the viewer. Mankind is that whose body and time are interwoven. The body and space of the handmade copper mailbox have time to wait for letters, from someone or somewhere whose memory may be longer than mankind's. The seal too, cast in bronze, and with the palpable presence of the hand that made it, will survive long after QR codes no longer open up virtual worlds. Its meaning and references will be reunited with the root system of material. The seal consigns hope of winning more time. Demands that we use all the time we have gained as efficiently as possible. To stay a while, just a A n n a j o h a n ss o n

moment, in the blank space of time gained makes me realise the necessity of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;poetics of cuttingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; you divulge to us â&#x20AC;&#x201C; over and over again. Roland Spolander

Triple act, 2012.

A n n a j o h a n ss o n

Installation. Dimensions variable.

Everywhere and Nowhere, 2014. Video. 08:18 min.

Rigmaroles, 2014. Documentation of performance. Video, 5:34 min., stereo.

Ingrid kl in t skog

Ingrid Klintskog

b. 1983, Uppsala, Sweden www.ingridklintskog.com

Touching the art While we are indoctrinated very early on not to touch an artwork, with perhaps the exception granted by an artist in a communal or interactive artwork, perhaps it has become more pertinent to ask ‘can the work touch us’? Turning the question around allows for a more layered situation where looking and reacting can assimilate the idea and practice of touch. By invoking the phenomenon of synaesthesia – a neurological condition where two or more sensory perceptions are conjoined – an embodiment through looking is suggested. This ‘mirror touch’ opens the possibility of images being reflected in our bodies: a sensory experience that connects our eyes to the body and Ingrid kl in t skog

its surroundings. Such complex folding of how we comprehend touch and our ‘collective bodies’ are found in the work of Ingrid Klintskog’s paintings at Umeå Art Academy. Klintskog’s paintings are large – indeed often bigger then the artist herself. She has painted feet, arms, portraits and now, more abstract looking paintings. I don't think that she is very interested in the different categories of painting and how they hold patterns and hierarchies of power. Arguments of abstract versus figuration, lyrical or process based mark makings seem to be less useful tools in trying to penetrate this work, or should I say might lead one up the wrong path in understanding what is at stake here. Hers is not a game of positionings, or endless labyrinths of redistribution, reconfigurations and realignments. Ingrid seems to be trying to make sense of an innate bodily need which is comparable to having breakfast or getting dressed. It is a bodily pattern which leaves a trace, one that she paints. This does not mean that she turns her back on the world to use Agnes Martin's words. Klintskog is fully in and of the world and she closely observes the one she knows. That leaves no space for ironic distance. We come up to the surface of these paintings and it is completely present. Fields of paint, layered in stripes or triangles. Colours of skin and flesh, kitchen cupboards and sky. Simultaneously dirty and unwashed but also airy and transparent. One painting in particular has an almost radiant presence. It depicts a number of what seem at first to be the flat surfaces of interlocking triangles. The tips elongated and skewed in a braided or sophisticated weave or plait. Shapes evoking human forms but also rooms, Klintskog refuses our grasp of what is depicted – a fold of flatness and space to be entered and felt. Red and green in different shades of opacity

tag, 2013.

Ingrid kl in t skog

Oil on canvas. 225 x 180 cm.

Utan titel, 2013. Oil on canvas. 225 x 180 cm.

Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas. 180 x 125 cm.

letting light pass through or not. The physical reaction to it is surprising and very direct. The feeling is of looking at something intensely intimate, almost too intimate, as though we have no right to witness it but cannot stop ourselves. It is an invitation to communicate on a sensory level. Is this reaction to do with a recognition of a pattern that already exists in our bodies? Could even this recognition press itself onto the political sphere, a spilling out of what we term the inside and outside of our collective intimacies? Ingrid Klintskog makes paintings as though they are necessary for her survival. It seems to be part of her breath â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in and out, slowly filling the body and emptying â&#x20AC;&#x201C; each breath being the very beginning of every action or movement. She puts paint on and then rubs it off. She scrubs the painting clean and then puts another layer on. Accumulations of paint collecting then vanishing, leaving a trace of that breath, a layer of dye, an imprint of a body and an action. It is almost like breath on a mirror, but this one stays and our bodies are reflected in it. Could it be Klintskog's breath that we see, or think that we see, when looking at this painting? I don't know but I cannot stop looking. Martin Gustavsson

Ingrid kl in t skog

Utan titel, 2013.

Ingrid kl in t skog

Oil on canvas. 225 x 180 cm.

Utan titel, 2013. Oil on canvas. 170 x 162 cm.

Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas. 180 x 125 cm.

J e n s LIND Q V I S T

Jens Lindqvist

b. 1981, Lund, Sweden www.whathasthefutureeverdonefous.virb.com

Approaching the end of possibilities at the current aeon of materialist society, we are faced with the rapid and complete collapse or transcendence into new forms of technological dependence and control – or a dissonant mix of the two. The art of Jens August Lindqvist offers moments that define personal histories as epiphanies, where proceedings before and after (in all their complexity) come down to some event that, while embedded in language and material reality are here, in part, escaped. He does so in a way that is simultaneously ironic and sincerely pathetic, in the form of sculptures and installations. Swedish society has been built for decades on the will to do ‘good’ and educate people to do ‘good’ things as ‘good’ citizens of a welfare state. This has reached a point where all that is discussed, if something is right or wrong J e n s LIND Q V I S T

and subsequent judgement, in a stalemate of set ideologies – a completely moralist society. The arc of threats towards the world is largely met by ignorance, or veiled by consumerism as lifestyle choices and goods. There really is no way forward at such a point, especially when the toll of neoliberal economy is eating away at upheld European ideals of democracy and fairness. This regression into conservatism and preoccupation with single issues and subsequent rise of populist rhetorics makes it easy to look for all kind of reasons for the inevitable decline of western societies other than to consider the global economic system itself, the powers behind it and its problems in entirety, never mind changing our behaviors and the machineries of this world. The art world is right in the centre. In this context, Lindqvist draws upon experiences and values from the many different strata of above mentioned society, a story ‘behind a moment’ where significant change occurs on a personal level. Rasmus West: In The Man Who is Waiting to Fall Trough the Floor of his Apartment you paraphrased Ilya Kabakov’s 1981 installation The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment, incorporating a story narrated by a young American hip-hop and spoken word artist Josef XVI (Joseph Lee). What was the idea about this particular narration? Jens Lindqvist: The character in the story is into some kind of obscure hip hop. There’s a double nature, love / hate relationship for american culture (and politics) here in Sweden, where for instance hip hop kids often adopt ideologies from overseas subcultures without knowledge of its background. The narrator is trying to make vocal the character’s mind, so there’s this constant play with reversal and doubleness. At the same time the story is constructed around swedish event culture and plays with

No title, 2012. Concrete podium, acrylic paint. 105 x 35 x 35 cm;

J e n s LIND Q V I S T

two sculptures, acrystal, graphite. 11 x 1,5 cm.

Feeling sorry for the professional identity 2014. Exhibition view: Galleriet, Umeå.

Don’t worry, it’s only evolutional machinery, 2014. Plaster, filler, acrylics. 93 x 40 x 10,5 cm.

similarities between its opportunist work situation void of safety nets and the semicriminal work situation of the hustler. RW: How does this work relate to sculpture? JL: I noticed I could not make this in the form of an object (traditional sculpture) – Kabakov made this very physical, constructed piece and I do the opposite. This piece is a sculpture that doesn’t follow my normal practices. It’s more in line with my method, and forced me to deviate from my approach to material and work with the human body as it creates an interesting contradiction. Kabakov, as many others in the Russian avant-garde talks about a physical, psychological and spiritual liberation which is not only symbolical; the cosmic liberation is for real, your body will be liberated from all earthly systems. I ask where the physical dream about freedom is today, amidst all this fear of external threats. Have physical places for utopian dreams become spheres of escape from a common responsibility in the discourse of globalization? If I am to sculpturally convey an intimate place of physical dreaming I have to create an inverted sculpture. RW: In (There are No Passengers on Spaceship Earth Only Crew) you are also into spiritualism? JL: Spiritualism, hm. The title plays with a phrase that I see as a luxurious post revolutionary conception accessible to a few. I am interested in the epiphany as a concept of a momentary truth that can be cast from an event – symbolic, material and J e n s LIND Q V I S T

narrative – as a sculptural method. This is an essential point, a power source that one can build from and backtrack to. It promises a sense of time. If the moment of truth is an awakening then my sculpture can be seen as its antithesis where there is something fundamental in material reality which doesn't change, no matter what we think. This is not diminutive to history in my opinion. There is a prophetic element to my approach that I see as an experiment with ideological speech. RW: From this view, Lindqvist's work avoids the hip, slick, or smart, in a way we are neither used to, nor can conceive of in sculpture as is. Instead, he is drawn to the pathetic, without alliance to any particular aesthetic but one that inevitably breaks its form; giving place to new meaning. Rasmus West

Patterns of proportional suffering, 2011. Exhibition view: Gallery in between,

J e n s LIND Q V I S T

Gustav Adolfs torg, Malmö.

In a vacuum a fart is also air, 2014. Textile, plexiglass, metal. 58 x 65 x 6 cm.

Viktigt meddelande till allmänheten, vi är världen, faran är över, 2014. Sound installation. 3:47 min.

Camill a lundquist

Camilla Lundquist

b. 1991, Hanoi, Vietnam Based in Umeå, Sweden and Hanoi, Vietnam. www.camillatmlundquist.wordpress.com

Transfer Fragile surfaces that get damaged in transport. A shimmer like the scales of silver and gold fishes, a mirror wherefrom more than 100 eyes stare at you. Horseheads, equally fragile, but nonetheless threatening. And Knifes. A mountain of knives, maybe 1,000 black blades that loom skywards against the snow. She learned it from comic books, temple walls and folk stories , she said, when she was young. There they were, in Vietnam embedded in everyday life: Horse-Face, and Ox-Head. They caught her fascination. They had the connection. They knew how to Camill a lundquist

walk across frontiers, to the underworld that they guard. Her Grandfather died. The funeral was something that happened, the way things often just happen in a child’s world. Horse-Face and Ox-Head would escort him through the gates of the underworld, like they do with all dead souls. The family burned a horse. Horses got burned when people died, so that they may accompany them to the underworld. Horses, because they were a symbol for wealth. Today, many burn Lamborghinis, and helicopters. And US dollars inevitably get burned. A Lamborghini has at least a bull in his logo. Three years later, they recovered the bones of her grandfather, they cleaned them, to set the spirits free; to make sure he would not become a wandering soul, and Horse-Face and Ox-Head would not have to find him. This also happened the way things happen in a child’s world. And she left the country to join her other homeland. She carried with her the memory of these shimmering surfaces, and the materials to create those surfaces. She applied those materials, Vietnamese lacquer, layer by layer, all thinned by kerosene. The layers were applied onto the traditional hardwood surface that is prepared in small manufactures, existing in just a few villages in Vietnam. She also inscribed the memory of incense burning, of dollars burning, of horses burning. Sleipnir is the horse with eight legs. Sleipnir is according to the Edda the best of all horses, here in the North. It can glide over land, through water and through the air. It transcends realms. It may well be that Sleipnir’s eight legs symbolize the four pallbearers. Its connection to the world of the dead reminded her of the past.

Helkappe, 2014. Vietnamese lacquer, papier-mache.

Camill a lundquist

Dimensions variable.

Untitled Mountain, 2014. Vietnamese lacquer, acrylic resin, wood. 200 x 250 x 30 cm.

Psychopomp Shrine, 2014. Wood, clay, Vietnamese lacquer, performance.

Then her grandmother died. Being far away from the place where she was buried, she decided to burn an effigy of Sleipnir for her (not a Lamborghini, nor a Volvo for that). It needs guidance to the nether world; eight legs are just enough. And she included a letter that she had written to her. Where the horse burned, a museum now rests. In the underworld, after one passes Horse-Face and Ox-Head, a mountain of knives waits for all sinners. Everyone has to cross that fierce border; no one does it not hurt. These knives she has transformed. Next to the museum stood a mountain of wooden knives that rose upward to the sky; it had to be carried by four people, eight legs, every day, in and out of the building. On the way to the abyss, there is also a mirror, which functions like a judgment. It tells if you are a sinner, and there is no one that isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t a sinner. This mirror she transformed to a purple lacquer painting, one from which over a 100 yellow eyes peer out and judge us. And the transformations continued. Sleipnir became a Helkappe; headwear worn by Bronze Age Nordic shamans to connect with spirits and gain invisibility. Hers is made from paper and glue, and covered with lacquer that shimmers. She has created ten of them which she dons during a performance, alternating them with a shapeless piece of cardboard. She seems to try their abilities to enable a transfer to the pandemonium. Larger pieces of wooden canvas were brought to the city. But the climate here is Camill a lundquist

different. It is dry; there is much less humidity and more artificial heat in winter. The material reacted. The wood bent, the lacquer, which was meant to be a deep purple, turned into silver. Tiny splinters broke away around the eyes and the dense lacquer dripped, accumulating in unexpected places. Many steps needed repetition, over and over again, like the process of a difficult translation. Some viewers associated ideas of a global culture. But this came too early, too easy. The communication is difficult. The translation appears to fail, since the materials, and the bodies, speak a different language, they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand the new surroundings. And the other way around is just the same, in that it results in a cultural confusion, albeit a prolific one. Pop culture travels, capital travels, and in contrast, the body, the mind, the soul are so slow. It needs rituals, to keep sane, and the rituals need objects. Incense burning. Seven sticks a day. A lacquer painting acting as a mirror, wherefrom 119 eyes stare down at you. Ten horse heads, fragile but threatening. A mountain of about a 1,000 black blades that loom skywards against the Swedish snow. Fragile surfaces that get easily damaged in transport. Florian Zeyfang

Camill a lundquist Untitled Painting, 2014. Vietnamese lacquer on lacquered wooden canvas. 170 x 70 cm.

Psychopomp Shrine, 2014. Wood, clay, Vietnamese lacquer, performance.

C h r i s m a g n u ss o n

Chris Magnusson

b. 1984 , GĂśteborg, Sweden www.rwealone.eu

[3/8/14 12:15:34 PM] gtd4s810: Boom [3/8/14 12:15:37 PM] Chris Magnusson: hello [3/8/14 12:15:40 PM] gtd4s810: TJĂ&#x201E;NA [3/8/14 12:15:49 PM] gtd4s810: hit me [3/8/14 12:15:56 PM] Chris Magnusson: hah [3/8/14 12:16:34 PM] Chris Magnusson: okay, so i thought we could talk a little about "role-play" of sorts in the art context [3/8/14 12:16:48 PM] gtd4s810: OK [3/8/14 12:18:48 PM] Chris Magnusson: i know of your work (obviously) and i find it really interesting. as far as i understand you are wrapping up your latest work "salong C h r i s m a g n u ss o n

flyttkartong". could you just shortly sum up the project? [3/8/14 12:20:52 PM] gtd4s810: I often describe my art pratice as a perfomative research. Longer perfomance often up to two years, where i "lose" myself into new identies. [3/8/14 12:24:29 PM] gtd4s810: So Salong Flyttkartong is a home tattooer mobile studio. It started after my Master From Mejan and I decided that I could have my first hobby, as a tattooer. [3/8/14 12:26:31 PM] gtd4s810: But of course after a while, acutlly when im standing infront of a plastic surgery Dr V in his office on Manhattan and I ask him to draw up the lines on the chest, he need to have as "guide Lines" during breast enlargment. Then I understood that i was in the middle of a new "perfomance" and the tattoo machine had become my tool [3/8/14 12:27:47 PM] gtd4s810: The spirit of Salong Flyttkartong developed long before that meeting, over a year before ( Dr V meeting was jan, 2013) [3/8/14 12:28:12 PM] gtd4s810: me hanging out with grafitti guys in sthlm, [3/8/14 12:29:01 PM] gtd4s810: and a think my way on tattooing has a similar "FTW" as these guys [3/8/14 12:29:13 PM] gtd4s810: we connected [3/8/14 12:30:02 PM] gtd4s810: So it ending up me actully did a kind of a social estetik project LOL, super interactive ,,, fuck [3/8/14 12:30:31 PM] Chris Magnusson: haha, pitfalls, sweet pitfalls [3/8/14 12:30:57 PM] gtd4s810: Yeah of course I tattooed the fuckin guide lines, myself infront of a mirror

Untitled, 2013.

C h r i s m a g n u ss o n

Watercolor on paper. 30 x 40 cm.

The Sleep Over, 2013. Mixed media. 150 x 150 x 60 cm.

Consummation, 2014 (detail). Installation, mixed media. Dimensions variable.

[3/8/14 12:31:02 PM] gtd4s810: haha¨ [3/8/14 12:31:50 PM] gtd4s810: social aesthetics the forbidden word [3/8/14 12:32:06 PM] Chris Magnusson: "a collaboration by Dr. V and Linnéa Sjöberg, 2013" [3/8/14 12:32:43 PM] gtd4s810: Yeah "the boob job tattoo" [3/8/14 12:33:41 PM] gtd4s810: now i googled images of boobs, didnt know if it was correct spelling, but it was… [3/8/14 12:37:24 PM] Chris Magnusson: haha my work with roles and identity is not as much as a practical thing as i think it is for you. except maybe when im supposed to be "professional" and standing in front of a crowd of people and talk about my work. i get really nervous and i (for some reason) come across as a general douche. i talked with a colleague about why, and we had a lot of different ideas to what might cause this phenomenon. [3/8/14 12:39:09 PM] Chris Magnusson: one possible factor could be that the artist talks are in english and where the english language is picked up from. i mostly learned english from action movies and rap music which often have a lot of attitude in the way people express verbally within these frames. [3/8/14 12:40:10 PM] gtd4s810: hahah I want to see your artist talk! [3/8/14 12:40:18 PM] gtd4s810: do u have any coming up in sthlm :) [3/8/14 12:41:08 PM] Chris Magnusson: but i don't know. C h r i s m a g n u ss o n

so when talking in front of my work in the student gallery i said something like "i have worked so much with my identity that i don't know who i am anymore". is that something you can relate to? [3/8/14 12:41:28 PM] gtd4s810: but why do u become a douche? [3/8/14 12:41:43 PM] Chris Magnusson: (i hope i will have a artist talk in sthlm some day…) [3/8/14 12:43:31 PM] gtd4s810: I kind of want to get lost, its then my work/ideas/ behavoir/vardag takes new forms, that i couldnt predict [3/8/14 12:44:06 PM] gtd4s810: and its in that moment I start to make stuff that is interesting (for me) [3/8/14 12:44:15 PM] Chris Magnusson: i mean, first of all, i get nervous and i feel as if the crowd want to hurt me. so i start to defend myself. i create a distance and i don't say much. this is somehow a way of power strategy. i start acting "cool" and some people see this as me being like the "male genius" [3/8/14 12:45:08 PM] gtd4s810: hahha. I can totally understand you, I always become "the clown" infront of an audience [3/8/14 12:45:18 PM] Chris Magnusson: story of my life Excerpt from a skype-chat between artist Linnéa Sjöberg and Chris Magnusson on March 8, 2014. Read the whole talk on www.rwealone.eu/talk.html

Untitled, 2013.

C h r i s m a g n u ss o n

Watercolor on paper. 29,7 x 21 cm.

Untitled, 2013. Mixed media. 35 cm x 25 cm x 10 cm.

Consummation, 2014 (detail). Installation, mixed media. Dimensions variable.

I d a p e r ss o n

Ida Persson

b. 1985, Ystad, Sweden www.idapersson.net

Recent revelations such as by Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden suggest that we live under an unprecedented supranational surveillance system. To a certain extent, the realms of control have shifted beyond material or physical noticeability. So far, the economy of power in the digitalised era leaves us with the ability to only comprehend its structure. Yet, there is no secret in the simultaneous continuation of the bio-political trajectories of control and discipline. Regardless of the choices made to keep the dominant political and economic balances of power stable, the surveillance system, and the fall-out from it, inevitably incorporates all semantics available to portray and meet the political needs of what normality and otherness constitute. Any behaviour outside of the norm is stigmatised as a threat to the community’s safety and, further, the individual’s identity. The methods and mechanics of strategically reI d a p e r ss o n

pressive politics and technocratic models of space are organised to function towards normalising undesirable behaviour or excluding it in order to establish new borders and limits. Ida Persson's work decidedly reflects on the histories of control and discipline, specifically, the relationship between the organisation of space and power, and the conditions for the individual. For several years, Persson has worked on a series of large-scale paintings that display a number of apparatuses which highly resemble the equipment formerly used in military or psychiatric facilities: dark grey and green machines, instruments or gadgets all seemingly created in service of surveillance and data collection, self-made weapons or instruments for electroconvulsive therapy. Although painted in a coolly realistic manner, they are fictitious. Persson adapts the roughly materialistic appearance of the models she observes – constructed by her from unlikely sources such as paper, tape and acrylic – on to the canvas. Despite their non-functionality, the realistic portrayal and sheer size of the works generates a strong, almost physical and intentionally authoritarian presence. Later works from this apparatus series sees Persson increasing the level of immediacy – often using larger canvasses and presenting tightly cropped close-ups of the machines – to create overpowering colour-fields. The reframing hints at a body or facial features, anthropomorphically reflecting our selves in the ubiquitous surveillance camera’s eye that peers from within and out, while triggering associations to the many dystopian science fiction protagonists – perhaps most redolently of Stanley Kubrik’s

Apparat 5, 2011.

I d a p e r ss o n

Acrylic on canvas. 164 x 139 cm

3:5, 2013. Acrylic on canvas. 260 x 150 cm

from left to right: 3:1, 2013. Acrylics on canvas. 260 x 160 cm. 3:7, 2014. Acrylics on canvas. 260 x 170 cm. 3:2, 2013. Acrylics on canvas. 260 x 160 cm.

HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The confrontation with these mechanisms and mechanics evoke submissiveness; yet also reflect on the conscious or unconscious level of one’s own will and subordination. In recent works, Persson has steered toward reduction, abstraction and density. An obtrusive choice of bright colours creates intimidating sections that depict varying perspectives of hybrid constructions that resemble machines, furniture and architecture. These geometric forms are punctuated by shadows – round button-like shapes that are structured into continuous rows of rectilinear patterns which, from a distance appear like impenetrable organisations made-up of straight lines and strict forms, while the close-ups appear fragile, tangible and tensile. The juxtaposition between a resilient manifestation of the surface and an obvious debility in its very structure, reflect on the structural defects within systems or organisations that are built on shaky foundations and held together only in an insubstantial and breakable manner. Both on a structural and a socio-political level, the neoliberal era with its complex global interdependence of organisations and their balances of power has taken on a new dimension of inherent instability. Still, the tensile quality of the painted structure might be a silver-lining, as if some change within the system itself – some steps out of the norm – are still imaginable. We might not be able to fully understand how power functions today, or find a language to express how deeply control and discipline have penetrated our very beings. It has become a driving imperative to explore this nameless force – at least intuitively. I d a p e r ss o n

We may have just made one step forward. Viktor Neumann

Apparat 7, 2012.

I d a p e r ss o n

Acrylic on canvas. 200 x 140 cm

3:2, 2013. Acrylic on canvas. 260 x 160 cm.

3:7, 2014. Acrylics on canvas. 260 x 170 cm.

Jaqueline Shabo

Jaqueline Shabo Mariia Kulikyvska

b. 1986, Stockholm, Sweden www.jaquelineshabo.com

Language at the End of Words… A Never Ending Love Story All that we strive for in everything we do, is to answer some very basic questions. Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we? Where do we go? And WHAT is THAT? And these questions get broken down into other questions, philosophical constructions of thought, language(s), categories, definitions. And when we no longer can think – We concieve. We create – Yes, I agree… some thinking has to go into that… but the result goes beyond words. Otherwise it's not art. And so finally the three of us sit in my kitchen in Östraby… There had been some confusion about the directions to get here. So I've had to wait several hours for these two unknown young women, referred to me by one of my "old" artists from the galJaqueline Shabo

lery-time… I am in recovery after my first knee-implant operation… I have restricted amounts of energy. I'm slightly annoyed. I thought they wanted to do a lesbian wedding ceremony and that we were to discuss that and my participation as a priest. It turned out to be something completely different… It had to do with politics… freedom… movement… our bodies… our spaces… where do we really enter or penetrate the (female) body? Why is the act of penetration so contaminated with aggression and violence… If you violate the spirit what happens to the body?… And what is the role of language compared to art? And I suddenly feel lifted. Electric… Full of energy. Thoughts, that I didn't even know I had, were coming out as perfectly constructed sentenses… making sense. And I could see the glitter in their eyes… the glances they shared with each other. And we had gone into "the zone"… Ah, that MAGIC! Eyes, hearts, hands, voices, explanations, hesitations, recapitulations… Laughter! We agree to agree… No, we were not having a same-sex wedding ceremony… Especially not with the metal grid "triumphant arch" with attached photos of Mashas squirrel-red-furry pussy hanging over us! Giggles! The pussy is a wonderful gift to the world of creation! But it's NOT enough as an artistic statement… at least not in that form. We can't pussify that spiritual experience of love. Love goes beyond! There must be some element of mystery to allow us to get into interaction with what we percieve. The pussy – however cute – is quite frankly to blunt! There must be other ways to describe the female experience of getting our integrity exploited, even questioned…

Mariia Kulikyvska: Homo Bulla, 2011.

Jaqueline Shabo

Soap. 180 x 90 x 45 cm.

"Ungrowth (The trailer)", 2014. Exhibition view: Galleriet, Ume책.

Kulikovska-Shabo Body and Borders, 2014. Installation, mixed media. Dimensions variable.

We agree that it's an ongoing project. It had a beginning in Kiev… but it has no ending that we can see… We turn our backs to the future, unseeing, while we analyze the past… Everything we create consists of known elements from our personal history… Only through our perception do we live in the present (and in our projections we live in the future) and even then something is "lost in translation"… Our senses are evasive, not to be completely trusted! There will allways be a gap between us and creation… always that fraction of time that lapses between perception and interpretation. That is our grief and sadness. That is our endless longing for the unmediated union between our bodies and our minds and the physical world that defines our "otherness". Our construction of language – the boundaries of our ability to describe the world that surrounds us and the sensations of our senses – is both possibility and emprisonment. To break down those prison walls we first have to agree that they are there – a shared obstacle. So we have to claim some territory as OURS, common ground. Then, like prisoners on either side of that wall we start digging in the hope of meeting somewhere in the middle. The paradox being, that the more well defined our tools of communication become, the further away from each other we seem to slide. So that when words end and art begins… we are so far away, so isolated from one another, that our only hope rises to that place in our beings that works like a spiritual "Checkpoint Charlie"; Jaqueline Shabo

our hearts. And heart reaching out to heart, we say to one another: "Please forgive me, for I know not what I'm doing". And the artist takes on the role of high priest/shaman/leader of cult and rite, creating bridges between the percieved reality and soul, bringing a "perfect offering" before our very eyes and inviting us all to lose our minds… Beyond words we start on a journey without a known destination. It's the ultimate blasphemy! It's the ultimate act of love! And so love becomes both the question and the answer. The beginning and the end. Road, Truth and Life. I love you Maria-Jaqueline! Body, soul, mind and heart. And I thank the benevolent Universe, that brought us together. Christina Meehan Lång Östraby 16th of March 2014, ordained minister of Church of Sweden, former gallerist (Galleri Lång, Malmö, Sweden).

Mariia Kulikyvska: Pisanky, 2012.

Jaqueline Shabo

Plaster, acrylic. 300 x 250 x 15 cm.

Jaqueline Shabo: One of many others, 2012. Acrystal, laquer, porcerlain teeth, hair. 160 x 130 cm.

Body and Borders, 2014 (detail). Installation, mixed media. Dimensions variable.

Madel aine sillfors

Madelaine Sillfors

b. 1982, Kiruna, Sweden www.madelainesillfors.se

Reading Madelaine Sillfors’s text Drawing in two dimensions two things come to mind. The first is that the text starts with a plan of a two-story house – one that I’m mindful of throughout. The second being how Sillfors describes walking through the plan, opening the possibility of whether the plan is the origin of the text or, on the contrary, if the text is the origin of the plan. In the exhibition ‘The Masterpiece’, Sillfors passes from the two-dimensional plane to the three-dimensional by presenting sculptures that combine elements from existing drawings. To realise this would entail perspectives from which the basis, or the point from which a projection could be drawn – a plan that would form a code. Madel aine sillfors

But perhaps equally the plan serves as an index for the text. In any book the index is the last thing that is written, gathering together and organising what is already created and structured. Likewise, Sillfors’s text reflects this point of temporal and spatial organisation which is not in the least lineal, as is the case with her passage from drawing to sculpture. It is in Sillfors’s description of her wandering through the household where she writes: ‘We go back down stairs and we end this tour in the heart of the house. The kitchen. The room of the hearth, this word can be read as a combination of the word heart and earth.’ The interdependence between ‘heart’ and ‘earth’ make me think more of the process that has led Sillfors to consider how language subtly shapes meaning and how her words retain their independent and forceful space of meaning, yet have overlapping morphemes. The process that Sillfors undertakes is not one based upon consequences or projections, but rather that consequence and projection is the idea itself. Her sculptural works are closer to that of lines that demarcate space, similar to lines that are traced on a blank sheet: they are spatial drawings. It is at this point, where Sillfors’s installation seems to work at the level of an image facing a mirror; however, instead of mimetically sealed, this mirror can be considered as a heterotopic site – as termed by Michel Foucault – one where the relationship between the drawings and sculptures become part of a threshold in this kind of mirror. Lina Maria Lopez

Lizard hmm, 2013.

Madel aine sillfors

Oil pastel crayon on paper. 24 x 34 cm.

City, 2013. Ink on paper. 17,5 x 23,2 cm.

Hus pรฅ hรถga (House on Heights), 2014. Wood, paint, rope. 453 x 575 x 300 cm.

Madel aine sillfors

Thread sculpture, 2013.

Madel aine sillfors

Ink on paper. 17,5 x 23,2 cm.

My little pooney, 2013. Oil pastel crayon on paper. 34 x 24 cm.

Hus pรฅ hรถga (House on Heights), 2014 (detail). Wood, paint, rope. 453 x 575 x 300 cm.

M at t i s u m a ri

Matti Sumari

b. 1987, Helsinki, Finland www.mattisumari.com

Fox-path drawing Matti Sumari tells me that he feels like a fox when searching for material at the junkyard. He is hiding from the security cars passing by, sharpens his ears for sounds of humans around, while his eyes search diligently through the landscape of debris before he enters. He creates paths, mapping this wasteland and pointing out where the goods are. Then he searches through the heaps of domestic and industrial waste, filling his bags and baskets with findings. He scouts everywhere throughout the city and knows sources for wood, food, clothes or whatever one might need. When out walking with Sumari you might suddenly find him face down in a dumpster, a waste container or picking up something right off the street. This act of hoarding has been M at t i s u m a ri

a continuous practice of his for several years; his studio, as well as home, crowded with stock he might use. I once asked him why he had collected 19 blankets in various colours, what does he need so many blankets for? I got my answer three years later when Sumari needed a dark space for showing his video projections and used the blankets in this installation to create shadows. In the light of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s biggest issues of global warming, horrible working conditions in sweatshops and the endless amount of garbage generated, one could see Sumari's way of making art as an environmentalist action. But picking up the garbage has other aspects to it. What he adopts really is trash, thrown away in its literal meaning. Whether stinking, dirty, wet and broken, Sumari still sees its resources. By picking up this litter, bringing it home, washing it, refining it and finally using it to produce art, a poetic and symbolic meaning is manifested. Sculpture takes on an altered approach here, both in an aesthetic and symbolic way, than if being made from pristine, bought material. Sumari uses all these different aspects of politics, aesthetics and poetry as his material when creating his pieces. The incentive, he says, does not stem from a political stand, nor an urge for expression, but rather from a process of multilayered causality where one part leads to the next. Matti Sumari's sculptures and other works have often the ability to function as a tool or machine. The sculpture, Decay and Achievement is, at first sight a compost, but it is not only that. If it was, he could simply make a pile of organic waste on the ground. Instead he sculpts a large construction. Sumari says that this ability of the sculpture makes them animate, they become something more than an image. It also creates an

Manual Manual, 2013.

M at t i s u m a ri

Video. 07:36.

Decay and Achievement, 2013. Salvaged metal, compost. 140 x 120 x 190 cm.

Secret Agent, 2012â&#x20AC;&#x2030;-â&#x20AC;&#x2030;2014. Wood, metal and acrylic, all salvaged materials. 180 x 360 x 184 cm.

ambiguity of how to relate to the piece, seeing it as a sculpture, a symbol and a tool. Decay and Achievement meets the visitor in front of the gallery. It is crafted from bicycles (fished up with a gigantic hook from the Umeå-river) and a salvaged oil barrel. But the outer appearance is hiding its content and meaning, the compost in the barrel. This content being organic waste slowly turning into soil, a constant transformation is, as I see it, making the piece come to life. It is the flesh and guts of the sculpture. You can see his interest in metamorphosis and cycles in all of his oeuvre. He has a great interest in the cycles of nature as well as the infrastructure in a city of today. By using material from waste containers and junkyards, he stops the entropy of trash for a moment. In his solo-exhibition ‘(The Logic of) Instruments Through a Hunter-Gatherer-Gardener’ all the pieces existed in a symbiosis where one sculpture needed another to survive. This interconnected course of events is present in everything Sumari does. He seems to use a very personal logic, the way he draws fox-paths over the junkyard is synonymous to the way he creates concepts and sculptures. Julia Selin

M at t i s u m a ri

(The Logic of) Instruments for Cycles Through a Hunter-Gatherer-Gardener, 2013.

M at t i s u m a ri

Exhibition view: Galleriet, Umeå.

Tower of Strength, 2013. Salvaged metal. 70 x 40 x 30 cm.

Secret Agent, 2012 - 2014 (detail). Wood, metal and acrylic, all salvaged materials. 180 x 360 x 184 cm.

Fabian t hol in

Fabian Tholin

b. 1980, Stockholm, Sweden www.fabiantholin.se

Drunk on paint Intoxicated with colour, Fabian Tholin makes large-scale paintings with a combustible range of orange, green, acidy yellow and beyond; colours largely invented and indexed at the end of the 19th century. Indeed, Tholin reflects the abundance of this moment when paints circulated to a new and excited audience. Often dense and amassed with lumps and squidgy smears, the works suggest illogical landscapes or maybe even ‘paintscapes’; a mapping of possible marks made without a governing rationality. Sometimes squeezed straight out of a tube and applied in circles, patterns or blobs, they denote nothing but the pleasure of doing. If there is freedom in allowing yourself to make choices based on pleasure, Tholin chooses to do so and is aware of Fabian t hol in

the implications inherent in such an unnerving proposition. Tholin chiefly asks how important it is to know what we are looking at, or define and decide what is represented. The way in which perception is bound by tastes and indicative of what is culturally significant is thrown-up by Tholin, and in turn, the problematics of those identities and differences are considered and recalibrated. While we are now perhaps familiar with the idea of performing an identity, so much so that it seems hard to imagine how, or in what way to resist it, Tholin’s work addresses what are the rewards when we antagonise it. At his most whimsical and flamboyantly colour smitten Tholin locates multiple identities diverging on a scale between outsider artist to conscious paint scribbler. In Scandinavia, and for that matter the rest of Europe, the solitary artistic production by the slightly insane – mostly male artists – has historically, and arguably still has, a significant function as an embodiment of difference. The paint-smeared fool who points towards our innermost dysfunctions and anxieties and conjures things looking differently to how they do, is that position, however romantically deluded, still valid? Indeed can these processes be used to put a spanner in the well-oiled workings of binary doublings, between the sign and its representation? Tholin seems to suggest that there are spaces in his paintings where these categories can be recombined and aligned anew. Tholin paints smaller paintings too. In his words, simple thoughts jotted down as portraits of an idea. Drawn from a stack of imagined images, each builds an archive of personalities. Not directly painted from any existing source material, they

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Untitled, 2013.

Fabian t hol in

Oil on linen. 190 x 240 cm.

Untitled, 2013. Oil on linen. 180 x 230 cm.

Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas. 260 x 360 cm.

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are pulled-up into consciousness from less determined cognisance and experience. Tholin looks for something not beyond himself, but through layers of likeness and resemblance making connections that inhabits his work. In Foucault's words, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;without imagination, there would be no resemblance between thingsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Tholin, with derailing pleasure, redraws the lines that hold such accepted resemblances and approved imagination in place with the heat and history of colour. Martin Gustavsson

Fabian t hol in

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Fabian t hol in

Untitled, 2012. Oil on polyester. 195 x 155 cm.

Untitled, 2013. Oil on polyester. 180 x 215 cm.

Untitled, 2014 (detail). Oil on canvas. 260 x 360 cm.

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Installation views May 3rd – May 18th 2014 Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden

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CVs

Lars Brink b. 1982, Stockholm, Sweden www.larsbrink.com Lars Brink has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2014) and Galleri Odd, Sigtuna (2012) and participated in group exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2012), IDKA Kulturkiosken, Gävle (2012), Umeå Konsthögskola, Umeå (2011), Bildmuseet (guerrilla exibition), Umeå (2010), Galleri60, Umeå (2010). Wenche Crusell b. 1987, Gotland, Sweden www.wenchecrusell.com Göteborg (2012) and participated in group exhibitions at Galleri 60, Umeå (2012) and Verkligheten, Umeå (2010).

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Wenche Crusell has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2013) and at Galleri ORO,

Mark Frygell b. 1985, Umeå, Sweden www.markfrygell.se Mark Frygell has had solo exhibitions at Galleri Maskinen, Stockholm (2013), Hantverkshuset, Ramsele (2013), Kulturgården, Luleå (2013), Martini Projects, Gothenburg (2012), and Ve.sch in Vienna (2011). He has participated in group exhibitions such as at Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (2014), Galleri Oro, Gothenburg (2013), Original Showroom, Umeå (2013), N (X), vienna (2011) and Galleri 60, Umeå (2009). Jonas Gazell b. 1979, Stockholm, Sweden www.jonasgazell.com Jonas Gazell has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2014), CirkulationsCentralen, Malmö (2013) and Galleri Maskinen, Umeå (2011) and participated in group exhibitions such as Tårnet, Copenhagen (2013), Mødestedet, Aarhus (2013) and Rutaruna, Kiev/ Sigtuna (2013). He received the Balticdonationen Internationellt stipendium (2013).

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Anna Johansson b. 1981, Öland, Sweden www.annajohansson.net Anna Johansson has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2014) and Sigtuna Folkhögskola / Sigtunastiftelesen (2011), Stockholm and has participated in group exhibitions such as at Rutaruna, Kiev / Sigtuna (2013), Umeå Academy / Golan Heights (2013 / 2012), BYOB, Norrköping (2013), Galleri 60, Umeå (2010). She received the Sigtunastiftelsens scholarship, Stockholm (2011). Ingrid Klintskog b. 1983, Uppsala, Sweden www.ingridklintskog.com Ingrid Klintskog has had a solo exhibition Galleriet, Umeå (2013) and participated in group exhibitions such as The Art Academy Gallery, Umeå (2012/2009) and Galleri 60, Umeå (2012). She has received the Baltic donationens travelgrant (2013) and the Kjerséns Minnesfond (2011). Jens Lindqvist b. 1981, Lund, Sweden www.whathasthefutureeverdonefous.virb.com Jens Lindqvist has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2014), Atrenacion, Mexico City (2011), Gallery Inbetween, Gustav Adolfs torg, Malmö (2010) and Almänna Galleriet, cvs

Stockholm (2009). He has participated in group exhibitions and festivals such as at Gagnef, Dalarna(2011), Crack, Forte Prenestino, Rome (2011), Enskila Galleriet Stockholm (2010), Almänna Galleriet, Stockholm (2009), Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm (2008) and Galleri Hangups, Stockholm (2008). Camilla Lundquist b. 1991, Hanoi, Vietnam www.camillatmlundquist.wordpress.com Camilla Lundquist has had a solo exhibition at Galleriet, Umeå (2014) and participated in group exhibitions such as at Galleriet (2013, 2012), Kite Aerial Photography project, Hue (2012), Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå (2012), University of Fine Arts, Hanoi (2011) and Galleri 60, Umeå (2010). She received the Hanoi University of Fine Arts exhibition grant (2011) and the Hanoi Art Magazine grant (2011). Chris Magnusson b. 1984, Göteborg, Sweden www.rwealone.eu Chris Magnusson has had a solo exhibition at Galleriet, Umeå (2013) and participated in group exhibitions such as at Vasa Konsthall, Göteborg, (2011), Six_A, Tasmania (2010), Galleri Box, Göteborg (2009) and Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm (2009).

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Ida Persson b. 1985, Ystad, Sweden www.idapersson.net Ida Persson has had a solo exhibition at Galleriet, Umeå (2013) and participated in group exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2013, 2012), The old hospital, Säter (2012) and Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm (2012, 2009). Jaqueline Shabo b. 1986, Stockholm, Sweden www.jaquelineshabo.com Jaqueline Shabo has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2014) and Gallery20, Umeå (2012) and participated in group exhibitions such as Relativt Reel, Umeå (2012). Current collaboration Kulikovska-Shabo with Mariia kulikovska. Madelaine Sillfors b. 1982, Kiruna, Sweden www.madelainesillfors.se Madelaine Sillfors has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2014), Dust Gallery, Umeå (2012) and at Bror Hjorts Hus, Uppsala (2011). She has participated in group exhibitions such as at the Golamea project, Umeå (2013), Latent, Säter (2012) and at Galleri Maskinen, Umeå (2012). She has received the Fredrika Bremer Fellowship Bror Hjort fellowship Drawingstipend (2011).

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Stipend (2013), the Anders Sandrews foundation Education Stipend (2012) and the

Matti Sumari b. 1987, Helsinki, Finland www.mattisumari.com Matti Sumari has had solo exhibitions at Galleriet, Umeå (2013), Galleri Maskinen, Umeå (2012) and B-galleria, Turku (2009). Sumari has participated in festivals and group exhibitions such as the Art Moments Festival Budapest (2013), Bildmuseet, Umeå (2011), Europa Underground, Clab gallery, Lodi (2010), and Vårsalong, Skellefteå Konsthall, Skellefteå (2010). Fabian Tholin b. 1980, Stockholm, Sweden www.fabiantholin.se Fabian Tholin has had a solo exhibition at Galleriet, Umeå (2013) and participated in a group exhibition at Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm (2014).

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C ultural C apital

Design

MFA exhibition 2014

www.knaggengrafikk.tumblr.com

Umeå Academy of Fine Arts May 3rd – May 18th 2014 Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden May 30th – June 5th 2014 ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik), Berlin, Germany

Proofreading Chris McCormack Print catalog UnitedPress Tipografija SIA www.unitedpress.lv Print installation shots NRA, Umeå

Curator Viktor Neumann

Academy of Fine Arts Umeå University

Professor

SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden

Florian Zeyfang

www.umu.se/art

Editor

Examinations ISSN 1653-6185

Viktor Neumann

ISBN 978-91-978914-9-3

© Installation shots – Johan Österholm • www.johanosterholm.se © Art, image, text – Lars Brink, Wenche Crusell, Mark Frygell, Jonas Gazell, Anna Johansson, Ingrid Klintskog, Jens Lindqvist, Camilla Lundquist, Chris Magnusson, Ida Persson, Jaqueline Shabo, Madelaine Sillfors, Matti Sumari, Fabian Tholin © Text & contribution – Martin Gustavsson, Nicklas Hållén, Igor Isychenko, Christina Meehan Lång, Lina Maria Lopez, Viktor Neumann, Julia Selin, Linnéa Sjöberg, Roland Spolander, Rasmus West, Florian Zeyfang Thanks to: all staff at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, at Bildmuseet and ZK/U, Umeå2014, the Embassy of Sweden in Berlin: Marika Lagercrantz and Mareike Röper, Henrik Andersson, Bagis, Peter J Bartel, Beyonce, BFS, Gabriel Bohm Calles, Arngrímur Borgþórsson, Andréas Brännström, Francois Bucher, Ann Edholm, Henrik Ekesiöö, Carin Ellberg, Britt-Marie Sandström, Gerd Aurell, Roland Spolander, Daniel Kallós, Pär Enoksson, everybody who´s keeping it real, Femtastic, David Francis, Niklas Goldbach, Martin Gustavsson, Nicklas Hållen, Edvard Heinmets, Petri Henriksson, Kristofer Henry, Igor Ishenko, The Internetz, Robin Johansson, Stina Kajaso, KFG, LBC, Josef XVI (Joseph Lee), Patrik Lindmark, Linn Lindström, Lina Maria Lopez, Elvine Lund, Christina Meehan Lång, Per Nilsson, Ellen Nordin, NRA, Ann-Carin Olsson, Valgerður Pálmadóttir, Kristoffer Palmgren, Oskar Sandström, Julia Selin, Elin Seth, Family Shabo/Karlsson/Kulikovska, Skype, John Söderberg, Aslak Sumari, Linus Svensson, Nguyen Thanh Tam, Veronica Thimander, Rasmus West, Anton Wester, Katrin Westman, Andreas Wittwer, Vinícius Zarpelon.