ARTLAND

I recently met Fantastic Mrs. Fox again, and Fantastic Mr. Fox as well. Both in the animated film by Wes Anderson and in real life while out skiing on the sea the other day. Mrs. Fox is an old acquaintance from last year when she and her friend lured around our house every other day.  Their brownish-red colours and magnificent tails were impressing.  We follow their traces, but our meetings are very quick, almost as if they are unreal. Mr. Fox looses his tail in the movie and it is used as a tie by the crooks.

Mr. Fox from the novel by Roald Dahl could not stop stealing, while our real neighborhood offers very little to steal and ice-hard ground not possible to dig a centimeter into.  I guess birds have an uneasy living around them though.  Still, the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Willem Dafoe echoes when Mrs. Fox runs in the deep deep snow to find a hideout, or maybe something to eat and drink for New Years Eve?

The most prominent portrayer of foxes in Sweden was the painter Bruno Liljefors. His work can be seen at Thielska galleriet in Stockholm until the end of January in an exhibition celebrating that it is 150 years since he was born. There are some foxes to be seen here among many other works depicting nature with a seldom talked about versatility. Liljefors turned his fox-paintings into mass production in an economic sparse time and hence the market does not like them as much as his birds which are easier to sell according to auction houses.

One of our evening newspaper quoted a joke about him and it goes something like this:

- What did Bruno Liljefors say when he painted Mona Lisa?

- Ehh, I don’t know. What?

- Fuck, it has become a fox.

When wandering along the Motlawa River, leaving the old city and walking towards the contemporary art centre Laznia in lower town, you will bump into an unusual sight. A long truck is stuck under a bridge. It looks like someone took a chance to drive the truck fast to make it out on the other side, but failed badly since the bridge is too low.

The truck is part of the Outdoor gallery of CCA Laznia. Laznia itself works in a former bathhouse which was transformed into a vibrant art scene in Gdansk. Lex Rijkers and Daniel Milohnic are the creators of Auto Art.  The active pedagogical department of Laznia runs workshops inside the truck and also outdoor in the area. You can see traces of the project on the pavement, other pedestrian areas, on small houses and fences in the neighborhood.  Artists run workshops in different forms and media, like visual art, theatre, sound, music, dance and street games. People are invited to take part of creation and the place evokes hope of that anything can happen here in this run-down area.

Dark November and December hosts many opportunities to see art if you are in Gdansk.

At CCA Laznia you can see the installations of South Korean artist Kyungwoo Chun. One thousand residents of Gdansk have shared their thoughts on how the Solidarity movement affected their lives. You can see the paintings of Katarzyna Swinarska in her exhibition Family Relations. References to old iconic paintings and pictures from today’s’ media are mixed into reflections on the role of women.  Rosa van Hofwegen has made a scenic and staged ode to deceased mothers with displays of collected memories from many mothers in her exhibition Loss of Sorrow .

Marek Radke shows a spatial and geometric installation at the new Gdansk City Gallery No 1 in the very city centre. In a spirit of a more humorous constructivism his objects reflects ultraviolet rays in different manners and makes you a bit lost in space.  On the backyard of Gdansk City Gallery, on the wall of the old cinema Neptun, there are more surprises for the curious. A monumental wall painting is made by Mariusz Waras and Gionata Gesi. "Last movie" is a bombastic painting above an older mosaic-wall and your eyes wander along between Michelangelo's  Last Judgment, Mickey Mouse and film-history in a mural that really takes over this secret place. Machines and technical spare-parts to something unknown, deconstructed, is a counterpart to all building sites in Gdansk.

At Wyspa Institute of contemporary art in the famous shipyard there is an exhibition called Re-designing the East, on political design. And, if you are there on Friday there is a special house-warming party in their winter cold space.

The Narration-festival using forgotten and neglected locations in the city is however over for this year.

Since the city of Gdansk is a champion to be the Cultural capital 2016 it is great that they are warming up both the art scene and the winter. See you soon!

Can you send nothing – nothing packed in a cardboard-box - back and forth between Stockholm and New York? Can you apply plaster around an environmental disaster? What if we presented artworks to an audience despite no presence of an actual artwork? Do we really know how long a ruler is? Do we remember the disappointed and offended people from the daily newspapers? What if Joseph Beuys really would be here today?

In the exhibition on Conceptual art in Sweden Kalmar Konstmuseum has compiled a presentation of many forgotten works from the fifties and forward. Ideas, philosophy, seriousness and subtle humour are mixed. Works that was made in the sixties which could have been made today or the opposite.  You need time for reflection in this condensed and interesting show.

Is there something different in Swedish conceptual art compared to other countries? Why didn’t the large art institutions embrace and show conceptual art? Many small art publishers, galleries and artists or artists’ collectives in the south of Sweden seem to have been the cultural bearer. Leif Eriksson, The collector of artists’ books, and Bo Cavefors and Kalejdoskop publishers for instance.

The artists Anna Lundh examined nothing. She sent a parcel containing nothing between Stockholm and New York. The documentation is shown in the exhibition. Nothing, or silence, is also in the sound work by Conny Blom 4.33. Minutes of Stolen Silence. Who owns the silence? Does John Cage have the copyright?

Annika Ström refers to nobody in her green nuance-painted text-piece in “This work refers to nobody”. In an art world that constantly wants to compare artworks by different artists her work stands like her own statement, whilst name-dropping a reference to a famous artist could make your stocks rise on the market.

Alessandra di Pisa investigates the idea of art. What is art and how does it come into existence? She explains an artwork and discusses it with an audience at Liljevalchs konsthall. But, in fact there is no artwork present. Or is there?

The walls filled by disappointed and offended people create a monumental work of faces. Magnus Bärtås has collected the complaints in newspapers since 1994. He uses a method I and many children with me found amazing in the seventies. By melting candle wax and drip it on the picture the imprint of the face is stuck on the wax when you remove it.  Pale imprints and pale faces similar to pale memories. They all feel like life has treated them unfair. The artist who wants to keep his studio in a condemned dockyard. The artist who feels graphic art has lost its legitimate status. The resigning local politician who claims to be the subject of a conspiracy. The man whose potato crop was destroyed by constant rain. The man who spent his entire life in asylum by mistake. The woman who is called ´psycho´ by an insurance company and is refused further compensation and so many more complaints. They probably need to sing it out loud in the Complaint’s choir of Oliver Kochta Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleinen…

Art Line - it's exciting work to start up a new organization for long-term co-operation with many partners in an EU-project. My sister sent me a file on being busy. Maybe she wants me to call her? The file is in Swedish, but I imagine you have all been waiting in a telephone queue. Listen! (..and thank you The ark for the loan of your title).

The last day of October is All Hallows Eve and some days later All Saints’ Day, Dia de lot Muertos and Zaduszki turn up when dusk sets in. In this twilight zone the dead people come to meet us. During Halloween we should get scared by monsters, witches and the living dead. During All Saints’ Day we remember and honour the dead in another way.

In Sweden we bring the Nordic design to our graveyards. Distinct dark wreaths made by pine-tree twigs and perhaps a pine-cone as decoration for it. A white candle-light. Solemn, but also a reminder about how short life is.

When living in Poland I followed the stream of people to the nearest graveyard on Zaduszki afternoon. Families and relatives get together and bring not only candle-lights in different forms and sizes, but also lots of flowers in warm colours to the graves. People meet and talk, many have travelled far to spend time with their relatives. In the evening it’s an orchestra of silent candle-lights from every graveyard. Next day on the same places a grey and dark November is almost like a surreal blooming paradise.

In Mexico the day of the dead is celebrated with a party for relatives, where skeletons can be seen dancing and the children can eat candy in forms of skulls. In the homes an altar is built and decorated with flowers, food and drinks and things to remember the dead. Maybe a saint or a pumpkin. Cultures and traditions blend. You stay all night at the graveyard.

In old times Samhain was celebrated by the Celts. Summer was over, a dividing line in the seasons. At these times many thought that evil powers were especially active. To guide the dead who might be on their way back home this evening and to scare of the witches they lit bonfires. “Trick or treat” was a joke during night time. So Halloween is actually a Celtic tradition from the beginning. (I got the information about Samhain in Martin Modéus book on traditions and life).

I met the living dead during a warm summer’s day, in daylight. During the culture festival in Stockholm this summer bleeding youngsters and scary figures with torn clothes shuffled along the streets in a Zombie-walk. Zombie walks can for instance be annual or created like flash-mobs, the figures grunt and groan in a form of role-play when moving around a city. You can meet special zombie pub crawls or political zombie-actions like a hunger charity event.  Here I got a distinct feeling of the zombies having fun, but also a protest about not feeling at home in public space.

I read in the news that one’s computer can be abused by a zombie-network. How do you know this? You don’t. But if your computer is slower than usual, it might be a sign…

Since winter and autumn-festivals are scarcer in Sweden, many happenings jostle during our short summer period. When the living dead entered streets of a Stockholm filled with tourist groups from China, beer-drinking Scotsmen in skirts and stilt-walking teenagers it’s a festive atmosphere.

A carnival is what I would need in dark drowsy November. Memento mori, but don’t forget that we are alive and kicking.

The intensive smell haunts you when entering the exhibition “Make yourself at home” at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. When walking the stairs the smell is pungent. Your nose guides you to a golden glowing city built of couscous on a circle-round table. “Untitled (Ghardaia)” by Kader Attia consists of the large sculpture and two black- and white photographs.

Ghardaia is an Algerian city built from five settlements, with much of its medieval architecture, straight lines and a circular city plan intact. Whitewashed houses terraces along a valley and a minaret on each hilltop.

Le Corbusier and other modern architects visited Ghardaia in the thirties and we can find their source of inspiration in European building design, but here with utopian dimensions.

A medieval town in a rough desert setting inspired the functional aesthetics in Europe.

I read that Attia grew up in a Parisian suburb with his parents who were Algerian immigrants and think of the political aspects of functional architecture and suburban planning. With the building material couscous Attia softly brings the architecture back to its origin and identity.

The sculpture also reminds you about making sand pies as a child. How some forms fell apart when new moulds of sand were raised upon the first ones. Some forms could be connected.  Some were taken down by the sea. You knew it was only temporary. The building-process in itself was fun and the planning of it was made as a  structure for ideas on what you could possibly use and need if living there.  A small society.

The city of Ghardaia is dilapidated today. The city of Kader Attia slowly disintegrates.

In a process of three months everything will fall apart.

The exhibition “Make yourself at home” can be seen in the aftermath of the election in Sweden and an intolerance which eats itself into Europe. Ten artists and artists’ groups show works about hospitality in a globalised world. The exhibition circles around notions of migration, home, displacement, hospitality, international conflicts, belonging, a global state and a colonial heritage. You can see it until November 21^st.

Many more interesting works by A Kassen, Philip Aguirre y Otegui, Kenneth A. Balfelt, Olaf Breuning, Mie Mørkeberg, Otobong Nkanga, George Osodi, Pascale Marthine Tayou and Wooloo. The curators are  Charlotte Bagger Brandt and Koyo Kouoh.

YES! YES! YES!

Art Line got through the eye of the EU-needle.

Let's start the artprojects!

Read more about the partners from Poland, Germany, Kaliningrad, Lithuania and Sweden

on my website.

Click here to read more: http://www.artland.se/aktuella-projekt/art-line-350488

Malmö! Would have been great to be able to multiply yourself this Saturday evening.

During six hours, from dusk until Midnight and not dawn - you could meet art in every corner of the city. Amazing to see all the people moving around in the city with the same aim and interest in investigating art. One could see small beehives in the dark city, where crowds gathered on pavements in the light from the galleries.

The release of the catalogue of Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans took place at both Malmö Konstmuseum and Gallery Ping-Pong. Their new photographic exhibition opened at Ping-Pong this evening. The catalogue consists of one printed catalogue and an interactive CD-ROM made by Rolf Hansson who made a fantastic work blowing life into this format. We are several writers with different perspectives in the catalogue. On the CD you walk around the virtual museum and sense their exhibition in another way than if you move there IRL.

Jeannin and Schuurmans are very generous in their idea to screen all films.  I often wish I could spend some more time with a film again, after watching it in an exhibition – but these occasions are very rare. Some photographs in a catalogue which never can give justice to any memory or work are mostly the case. I hope they set a good model for more artists and art institutions.

Everyone does the opposite from what the three wise monkeys do in the myth and in the Japanese art: talk art, see art, listen to art. I know I misinterpret the real Buddhist meaning of the motto “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" now, but there was very little evil this evening. Yes, in some works by Jukka Vikberg one could experience the terror of war. In a mixture of moving parts, sound, sculptures, raw wood, technique and installation there is for instance a symbolic work blending game and play with a pieta-figure and plastic soldiers.  Nobody close their eyes. If we close them, the screaming of the seven brothers in the novel by Alexis Kivi will haunt us in the major Vikberg installation at Gallery 21. I curated an exhibition in Finland some years ago with a title borrowed from this book and remember the special juicy language in it. Take a look at “Kaukauna Kavala Maailma” (Under “Utställningar”) on my website if you want to know more.

Vibrant and chaotic. Art Copenhagen last weekend. Many galleries wanted to show many many of their artists at the same time. It turned out to be a great  adventure to weave one’s way through different  expressions and techniques.  One should have blinkers, or a cornet with a small hole in the end, to be able to give the art works the space they deserve.  What a hotchpotch, but many pearls in the jungle are to be found.

Some, like the works by Marijke van Warmerdam created an intermission.  Galleri Susanne Ottesen gave their entire stand to one artist. Photos of the reflection of trees in water, printed on mirrors and turned upside down. The viewers also become a part of the work. What do we really see? Three works and a lot of space, simple, clear and sparkling in this environment. Art Copenhagen is a nice art fair and comfortably small in size.

Martha Rosler! I smile. It’s great to see her work in the State of the Art-part of the fair.  Rosler plays a manic housewife with an almost hidden panic in her video “Semiotics of the Kitchen” from 1975.  She shows different household utensils and says the name of them and try to be objective. When writing the letters of the alphabet with a knife and fork in the air she looks like she came out of a Samurai or Kung Fu-movie or the Tarantino-film “Kill Bill”, but in a more 70ties-style. Imagine her in an exploitation film from the same time!

The animated films by Nathalie Djurberg at Kristianstads Konsthall take almost exactly one hour altogether to watch. But when you go around the carefully choreographed and built rooms you lose the sense of time. You watch one film from the middle and another from the beginning and you may see yourself starting all over again with the film you began seeing from the end.  Some sounds slightly slip into one another and entices you to wander off. Then you want to go back...It is as if we enter a universe of baroque distortion, both absurd and real at the same time.

People and their bodies and minds seem to disagree in the films.

Anger, sorrow and joy overlap.

Anything can happen here as well as in our sometimes violent and cruel reality.

Her installation “The Experiment” at the Venice Biennale was overwhelming with films and large extraterrestrial swollen clay flowers in a dark jungle of anxiety. Twisted lust, power and frustration. Here in Kristianstads Konsthall you can see the films Greed, Forest and Cave (The Experiment) in the same installation as in Venice. It is condensed and minimalistic here. The difference from Venice is that there are no flowers or crowds of people. The audience who somewhat (strangely enough) enhanced the tense atmosphere but also made it difficult to experience. To suddenly meet a real person here  in one of the rooms makes you take a small jump, and it’s great for the show.

After seeing the films, you can listen to Nathalie Djurberg and her companion Hans Berg who created the music to the films. There is a presentation in an Audio guide and you can hear what they thought about when realizing the films.

The number of staff at Kristianstads Konsthall is small and Claudia Schaper and Thomas Kjellgren at Kristianstads konsthall work hard to realize a qualitative program to be proud of.

The poetic vídeo “Homecoming“ by Maria Duncker shows a lonely stone figure looking for company in a vast stony area by the sea and the open horizon. The sublime moment escapes the figure. It is not the time for contemplation.

There seem to be no one to talk to or embrace.

Is there anybody out there?

The atmosphere in the works of Maria Duncker stays in your mind. She let us see small things around us and start wondering - where do I belong? The persistent high-pitched sound and the fast movement of the camera strengthen the dramatic ending of “Homecoming”.

The works of Maria Duncker show sense of humour, melancholy and an existential earnestness that few can balance. Her work is deeply rooted in Finland and Scandinavia, but deals with universal thoughts.

Therefore, it is natural to see the work of Maria Duncker anywhere in the world. Could she have been the inspiration to the person who built some figures by the white limestone by the sea and horizon in Croatia this summer?  On the stony stony stony shore with a view over the Mediterranean Sea I met the friends of the figure in the film. An unknown artist made a secret homage.

During her time as a Ars Fennica-candidate she showed giants walking the streets of Helsinki. Tender and clumsy sculptures. Looked like found stones piled up on one another. Not the stones we find in classical eternal art, but the stones waiting to explode, disappear and turn into gravel.

Don’t miss her videos at Virserums Konsthall this autumn as part of the exhibition “Tales from the forest”.

You can for instance see and hear “Lovesong of a little spruce” and four more works.

You have all autumn to make a visit and adventure-trip there.

And, if you want to read more about Maria Duncker, take a look under “Artland – Utställningar – Tales from the forest, text in Swedish and English.

Art history is difficult to avoid seeing in some situations.

At least for someone working with art.

Here is another photo from the sea in Croatia. Thunder and lightning.

No male Caspar David Friedrich-figure in sight, but two girls.

No romantic contemplation, more of a great adventure.

The symmetrical, pointed, minimalistic and sharp forms in a painting by Ann Edholm have a reference in the work by the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich.  In the painting”Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” Friedrich placed himself by the dramatic sea with his back turned towards us. His composition offers triangular forms in the horizon, although it is not what you see at a first glance. The work of Ann Edholm talks to Friedrich and gives you hints on possibilities to see both of their work in new perspectives.  I’m alone in the silence of the exhibition and the works of Ann Edholm whisper demanding in my ears.

Ann Edholm often invites us to a dialogue with artworks from the art history. This is also the subject of an exhibition in Germany where for instance the work of Caspar David Friedrich is to be seen in the Hamburger Kunsthalle during autumn. “The Sea of Ice” from 1823 is juxtaposed with Richard Long’s Mountain Circle from the nineties. Conversations between old masters, modern and contemporary art are made possible in the exhibition “All art has been contemporary”. Forms, themes, questions and expressions have a lot in common now and then.

The exhibition with Ann Edholm at Galleri Magnus Åklundh in Malmö can be seen

until October 2nd.

The last date to see “All art has been contemporary” at Hamburger Kunsthalle is October 31^st.

An artist who also works in dialogue with art history to give it new meaning is Henrik Lund Jørgensen. The Danish West coast and the dramatic sea was the motif and scenery for the Danish open-air painter Michael Ancher as well as for Henrik Lund Jørgensen.  He appropriates the same composition as the classical Skagen-painter, but he does not depict fishermen risking their life for the catch of fish. (“Will he round the point” and “The crew is saved”). Instead we meet refugees from a refugee-camp at Hanstholm in his photographs, video and found objects.

The refugee-camp Lund Jørgensen visited many times is situated next to hundreds of bunkers left from Second World War II. Many years in between history and today. The bunkers remind about fear, uncertainty and politics. The sea reminds about people trying to escape across it and people who dies trying. Few people are alive to tell about their memories of the war. The refugees are safe now, but anonymous, marginalized and have no public voice in society.

“From refugee camps around Europe empty postcards are sent home to tell of one’s whereabouts. By not writing any name or message, one safeguards both oneself and one’s family. Note that a dot on the back of the postcard marks the location of Hanstholm.” (caption for sketch, Lund Jørgensen).

Who tells the story of a refugee lost and disappeared in the sea between let’s say Africa and Greece?

Where is his or her memories, who keeps them alive?

His show recently ended at Norrtälje Konsthall, but you can watch some works on his website www.henriklundjorgensen.com

Daniel Hoflund also got inspiration from an old painting in his installation at Kalmar Konstmuseum earlier this year.  The widow of a sailor sitting with her elbow on her knees, gazing out on the sea. The video, photographs and objects dealt with loss and disappearance on the sea.

Henrik Lund Jørgensen quotes Balzac:  

Isn’t it rather, all things considered, that I remain suspended on this question, whose answer I tirelessly seek in the others face: what am I worth?   

Soon the season for hard wind and storms is on its way. This morning however the sea was totally calm outside my window. It mirrored everything around along with the sky.

I recalled the photographic series “Der Wanderer” by Elina Brotherus”, also with the name “The New Painting”, which can give us an idea on the contextual side of the works. Immediately the painter Caspar David Friedrich comes to my mind again.

We see a standing woman looking out over different spectacular landscape settings. The works are self-portraits, although we can only see her back. We look together at the mountains, the hills, and the water - calm and not dramatic as in the Friedrich-paintings.

Time seems to stand still. But we can at the same time sense the differences between day and evening because of the very special light. Especially the pale nuances of blue or orange, creating an atmosphere of stillness and slow movement. Almost as if a film is about to start. It is the beginning of something.

No romantic illusions seem to be in the air. No heroes around to conquer the world.

She owns the place and time for a few minutes, but not for eternity. http://www.elinabrotherus.com/photography/the-new-painting 

Another artist turning his back to us when gazing out over the nature is Torbjørn Rødland in his early photographic series “In a Norwegian landscape”. More intimate forest in the photos and also a lake, not the sea. He has brought his plastic bag from the supermarket Rema 1000 as an anachronism or comment on everyday and the sublime. We can also see him turn around towards us in one work, walking out of the scenery and art history.

I remember curating his solo exhibition with these new photographs. During the show a classical portrait photographer came to me in anger saying that Torbjørn Rødland is not able to create art, that an artist would never ever let the portrayed turn his or her back to us. http://rodland.net/lands.html

Here is a photo from the middle of the seventies, “After tornado”, Highbury, London 1974. The rotating weather phenomenon of a tornado is an intense column of air which has contact with the cloud above and the ground at the same time. On the photo we see a man who might have experienced a tornado and ended up standing on his head, leaning a bit to one side. The upside-down world is a motif already in the 1600^th Century. Not only the physical reality, but also social order is turned around to be able to see the world in different perspectives.

The photo is from a booklet shown in the exhibition “The Realism Question” at Rumänska kulturinstitutet, the Romanian Cultural Institute, in Stockholm. It is shown until September 24^th. It is a pearl hidden inside Skeppsbron 20.

“The Realism Question” is an epilogue to the Bucharest Biennale 4: Handlung. Producing Possibilities this summer. What does realism mean today, compared to what it meant 40 years ago for instance? What part does fiction have? How did and do artist use realism today?

Tonight there is an interesting seminar with Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu, then engines behind the Bucharest Biennale since 2005.  Johan Pousette,  who was the curator for Göteborgsbiennalen together with Celia Prado, will also attend and the conversation leader is art historian, art critic  and lecturer Charlotte Bydler. Art and realism is one subject. Biennials as scenes for giving form to contemporary problems in society and the political-aesthetical agenda behind biennials is another connected subject.

The artists in the exhibition are Groupes Medvedkine , Paul Neagu, Ion Grigorescu, Kalle Brolin, Magnus Bärtås, Joana Hajdithomas & Khalil Joreige, Lina Selander, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor. Curator is Felix Vogel.

Paul Neagu is the artist of the “After tornado”-work and along with him and Ion Grigorescu from Romania we can start the history from the sixties. How to look upon the world from other angles than Social Realism? How to create art for the public arena, which normally was  used for military parades, power-demonstrations and large monuments.

Other agendas, like going underground, create hidden messages, working abstract is possible and art is an excellent medium.

Neagu was more into geometrical abstraction, but with a special way and wish to change social structures, while Grigorescu was politically more explicit. In the show we can see a film about the Romanian liberation day, with propaganda texts by Ceausescu to comment on what’s happening as well as seeing the event from a television documentary perspective.

One can’t stop seeing the video “Madame and Little Boy” by Magnus Bärtås, the intertwining of history, film, hidden messages and atomic bombs is intriguing.  All the works are worthwhile. You go out by the quay a bit later, breathe and see the world around you, people and histories just wandering past you.

-This might not be an exhibition for me, my then nine-year old daughter whispered to me in one of the rooms at Kara Walker’s solo show at Kunstforeningen GL Strand in Copenhagen during January last year.

That she did not know much about American history from the time of slavery and the relation between black and white was not the issue, but more the violent and sexual imagery. Race, rage and rape. Love and hate. The human size silhouettes stays in your mind and your body-memory for a long time. Silhouettes, considered as girl’s play and “low” pastime - combined with political meltdown gives you shivers.

My daughter went to the small bookshop and sat down to wait on a couch. The world outside did not want her to relax, but to react again. Twilight dusk coming closer, heavy rainy clouds in the air. Thousands and thousands of people marched outside the window on the other side of the canal. A demonstration against Israel’s war in Gaza. Angry and loud voices and movements, smoking and reeking crackers being thrown around. All violence made her sad, thinking of all wars in the world and long for her safe bed. No monsters there.

- I’ll cut both of your daughters, a young man said.

If it wasn’t for the situation I’d be scared. We were in the old- hilly-yellow-orange-coloured-sunny-cobbled-street-town Rovinj in Croatia. The young man started immediately. Arranged the girls, cut with his scissors, talked and looked for new customers at the same time. Not many minutes later the girls shyly looked upon their portraits, he was a skilled craftsman.

-There is my brother, he said and painted at the other silhouette cutter. And, my father, he is the one doing caricatures.  He is a professor at the Art academy, he continued. The family was here during summer, live in Moldavia otherwise and survived OK during tourist season. Our craftsman studied music the rest of the year. How the art professor managed to combine kitschy caricatures and the role at the Art academy I never got to know.

A survival kit?

I listen to the slightly psychedelic CD “Rymdkleopatra –existentiell progg”. Cleopatra from outer space - in a special Swedish music tradition flowing in a stream beside the commercial music and which roots dates back to the sixties and seventies.

“In space nobody can hear you sing-records” is the CD-label of the artist Lisa Jonasson. The label connects to the famous tag “In space no one can hear you scream” as in the science-fiction horror-movie “Alien” from 1979.  Borders between sane and insane, everyday life, brain-salad, mental operations and madhouses are sung about in a frail voice coming from somewhere in the sky.

If you go inside Kulturhuset in Stockholm now in September, into the newly opened space on the same level as “Plattan” you have some more weeks to see the silhouette cuttings by Lisa Jonasson, symbolically placed far away in a corner. There are connections between figures, masks, animals, creatures and body parts in a horror vacui that make your eyes wander around the works. Possibilities and impossibilities. Symbols and patterns. Everything seems to belong to one another and yet far apart at the same time. A storyteller in her very own tradition.

I can also recommend the Geist-magazine with the name “Filiokus” which Lisa Jonasson made with Matti Kallionen and other artists. Look and read and get thrown up their joint volcanic eruptions.

When living in Poland I almost drove off the road when seeing my first white stork live. It was exotic for me, who came from the north.

When driving further southeast this summer, we came into a small village in Hungary and saw a classical picturesque view – a stork’s nest on top of a telephone pole. Five storks standing in formation.

 We disagreed in the car.

- It was just an advertising sign!

- No! I saw feathers moving!

- They looked to good, they must be made of plastic!

- A sculpture!

We went back and parked outside the sleepy village bar to look at the storks. Suddenly one of them took a gliding flight I the hot still air. Their wing span was as wide as I am long.

Not plastic.

Came to think about an Aesop’s fable about the fox and the stork. How the fox invited the stork for dinner and served soup on a flat plate so that the stork couldn’t eat, and the stork invited back in the same nice atmosphere – serving the food in a long-necked jar with a narrow opening so that the fox could just smell the dinner. I always wondered why the stork came to visit someone who actually could eat her instead. And, why on earth she bothered to invite the fox back.

Lost in a fairy-tale? Caught by a sign for tourists? Trapped by an advertising sign in 3D? Seen a painting from somewhere in art history? What company uses storks in a nest for their advertising? (Maybe this sign exist only in my imagination? Tried to google it but could not find the picture that seems to be visible only before my eyes).

Real?

- Let’s go to visit the palace of frogs, my youngest daughter said.

When we visited last time there were a lot of small frogs and toads close to the “Truisms” on the stone wall by Jenny Holzer and “The Eight Chimney” by Jan Svenungsson. Frogs camouflaged in the beech wood. Frogs who tickled inside the palms of our hands. Art and frogs, who can resist?

There is still time to visit Wanås sculpture park, it’s open until the end of October. In these soon-Autumn days Wanås can even more symbolize the lust for wandering and a kind of stillness and contemplation as some of the art works also do.

The nomadic artists, the artist in movement, is discussed since many years. We don’t belong anywhere. We are at home anywhere. No otherness. No colonial thinking. Artists travel all over the world.

Residencies pop up everywhere.  Shorter journeys are scarce.

Ann-Sofi Sidén invited her students at The Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm to travel to Wanås without artificial fuels - to travel a short distance in geography (370 mile), but with a lot of time for meetings with themselves and others, seeing details and reflect. They cycled, sailed, walked or chose to ride. All journeys

were part of the art projects by Ann-Sofi Sidén and the students. At Wanås we can see the results. The suggestive four channel video installation by Ann-Sofi Sidén let us follow her riding trip together with Annette Felleson. In an earlier art project by Ann-Sofi Sidén she rode across Texas during 25 days. Now suburbs, countryside and towns in Sweden became their living room for 38 days. It is a slow road-movie of the everyday where time and space seems to be very real and at the same time unreal and dreamlike.

The yellow pigment creates a glade in the forest. The painting covers leaves, earth and the inside parts of tree-trunks in the installation/painting by Malin Holmberg. The sun shines extra on this circle-round place and anyone standing in the middle can either choose to feel chosen and hugged – or alone in a spotlight. The title of the work of Malin Holmberg is “I will stop loving you”. The work speaks in secret to the very red slightly rounded wall by Gloria Friedmann from 1991.

The figure of Filippa Barkman is on its way naked through the forest. When you get closer you see that the figure has her back turned to you in two directions. There is no face, no eyes to meet, just ears to listen with. The figure can hear you, but is mute itself. Feels like a new born adult and a luring siren of the woods who without a voice asks you to follow her on her “lost” walk.

The red large shining large thrown up in the trees here and there in the park is a playful installation, especially close to the swings in impossible and possible heights. The balls are stuck, the play is over and the installation suddenly turns into something else. “Double Dribble” by Anne Thulin evokes thought about Homo Ludens, the playing man, as written by Johan Huizinga. Play and game as a prerequisite for peaceful existence among humans.

“Façade/Billboard” is a flat silhouette of an old tree without leaves, supported by visible scaffolding. A real tree and a sign and symbol for a tree at the same time. The older work by Roxy Paine is still in the park, the metal tree “Impostor”. It shines in silver-colour and gives other connotation placed here than the “Maelstrom”-work on the roof top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last year.

Don’t miss the “Bad lawn” from the end of the eighties, on show from the collection.

There are so many works. I’ll stop here. Go there.

Today the mural painting by Linn Fernström was inaugurated by The National Public Art Council,

the architects and the builders. Vice-Chancellor Ursula Hass from Blekinge Institute of Technology cut the ribbon and months of painting and years of planning was over.

The work seize the high and long room and embrace it. The painting give the story possibilities to continue in other spaces. You can see it from every floor and from the spiral staircase.

It is the first public art work by Linn Fernström and she described the differences between painting in solitude in her studio and being able to walk back and forth to be able to see the totality and measure it with the body – and the environment here were people constantly move around her and the restraint by scaffolding. The result is however overwhelming.

We meet a girl with loose marionette-strings attached to wolves.

The grey-scale dominates the painting, while exotic budgerigars in different colours fly around and creates even more illusory space around us. Like greetings from other cultures.

Opposites like wild and tame comes to one’s mind. Nature and culture. Consciousness and the subconscious.  

Does the girl follow the wolves or is it the other way around? Or, can they give and take?

Is the girl really balancing on the end of the ladder?

Are they playing a game with unsecure ending?

- Finally a woman on a horse!

My youngest daughter shouted when seeing a female figure riding a horse. It was not for real, the horse and the woman were frozen in time and movement. A woman or a girl riding a horse is otherwise a very usual sight, at least in Sweden.

Here they were casted as a sculpture of bronze.

Placed in a prominent parade street in an enormous roundabout.

Kings and men on horses are common stuff everywhere and all these monuments are telling us a lot about power relations between gender in the history.

On our go-East-and-South-Europe-tour during Summer we had a break in Ludwigslust and turned into the parade-street aiming at the castle. It is a very broad symmetrical street, divided into parts for driving, walking and riding. The Linden-trees also had their place in this avenue. And, there she turns up, riding side-saddle. Her hair falls freely over the thin vest and the long skirt wraps itself around her legs. No power-symbols or attributes around. The placing is a powerful factor.

Ludwigslust also have 24 fountains called “the Nuns” in the baroque castle garden and a Hofdamenalle, translated to Ladies-In-Waiting-Avenue in a garden-presentation. A court ladies avenue.

The alert Polish Institute in Stockholm invites to a Friday evening with electronic music, artists collective and DJ:s celebrating that it was 200 years since Fryderyk Chopin was born. Earlier this summer a beautiful tall ship sailed the Baltic Sea to celebrate Chopin with a pendulous ballet in the masts. Amazing was the spectacular fireworks composed like a colour- and sound symphony itself. A dense fog and smell of gunpowder made the audience stare at the battleship beside S/Y Chopin by the quay for a moment - during half a minute the harbour reminded about a war-scene and the world outside.

All the anonymous artworks in cathedrals and churches in Europe! Details made by stone-carvers. Drainpipes made like grotesque figures. Skulls staring without eyes. Secret patterns on the floor. Cloven-footed wooden legs on chairs. Came to think about “Where the Wild Things are” by Maurice Sendak when seeing some creatures in the gothic Meissen cathedral in Germany this summer. One of my favourite books as a child.

I read that Sendak got the inspiration not from monsters in a cathedral, but from his relatives. They came to visit his family when he was young, didn’t speak English and grabbed hold of his cheeks. Since the cooking of his mother was terrible he was afraid they would eat him instead! (Source TT Spektra news agency). Reading the Dave Eggers book and then seeing the film by him and Spike Jonze gave fuel to the unpredictable and inexplicable. Live wild in between reality and fantasy, but beware of the abyss.

…Die Neue Wilden or Wild Youth was the name given to some artists in the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties. They opposed to the Minimal and Conceptual art and painted expressive, colourful and intense.

… "Wild One" or "Real Wild Child" was first released in the end of the fifties and has been performed by many, but I recall Iggy Pop and Billy Idol embodying the lyrics.

I wish all colleagues, friends and readers a great Midsummer! Sunshine and full moon,

21 degrees in the sea! Let's rock it like Angus.

Using my day to clean up in old papers in between writing a text. I seem to have become my own institution when trying to save all papers that have ever been scribbled on for every exhibition, lecture or project that I ever have produced. Not to mention all articles and reviews torn out to be read later, but instead got lost. Now it’s soon gone to recycling. Clean and sane. Tidying up the past.

Since Joseph Beuys was in my blog just the other day, and in my mind for the text, I came to think about the cleaning of his process-based work “Badewanne”. The inside of the bathtub was smeared with fat, in the bottom there was gauze bandages. The outside had adhesive plasters as traces of a process. The piece was borrowed to an exhibition in Leverkusen and when it was time for the opening-party someone decided to clean the bathtub and fill it with ice for the beer. The art piece was destroyed forever. It was not an option to restore it, because the process could not be re-made.

My processes are interesting for me only and I can admit it is fun to read and remember old texts and e-mail-talks. Now it’s history and not even in a digital burial-ground.

What's up Sea?

Finland is an art-favourite of mine. Their art summers where anything can happen in large exhibitions in areas outside the large cities are not to be missed. One can go to Mänttä to experience the Finnish art scene of today in the Mänttä Art Festival which is shown in the Honkahovi Art Centre and other places close. The villa by the lake is in itself a work of art. The festival has been arranged annually since 1999 and before that it was a biennial. The festival shows almost 50 artists this summer.

Rauma Biennale Balticum is another fantastic exhibition with artists from the Baltic countries. Every second year the director Janne Koski and curator Henna Paunu merge artists under one theme. This summer theme is What's up Sea? And don’t forget the wooden city of Rauma.

Take the chance to see “the Loop” by Julita Wojcik, where she is the captain of a passengers ferry for a moment and creates a sublime loop on the sea in between Poland and Sweden.  See photos and read more under “Utställningar” – “Sy ihop/Zszywanie/Sew together” on the Artland website. There is also English text although titles on my web is in Swedish only unfortunately.

The other artists of the exhibition are:

Artists: A Kassen (DK)    Johanna Billing (SE)    Katja Björn (DK)    BlueSoup Group (RU)    Ulu Braun (DE)    Sergey Bratkov (RU)    Egle Budvutyte (LT)    Terike Haapoja (FI)    Kaspars Groševs, Ruta Kiskyte, Dara Melnikova, (LT)    Antti Laitinen (FI)    M.A.R.I.N. / Tapio Mäkelä (FI)    Miks Mitrevics (LV)    Jaanus Samma (EE)    Claudia Schmacke (DE)    Dominika Skutnik (PL)    Laura Stasiulyte (LT)    Jaan Toomik (EE)    Julita Wójcik (PL)    Vadim Zakharov (RU)    Graphics/Pasi Rauhala(FI)

"Creativity is not in the monoploy of the artists. (...) Everybody is an artist, everyone can determine the content of life in his particular sphere, whether in painting, music, engineering, caring for the sick, the economy or whatever. All around us the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped or created.". Word by Joseph Beuys.

Take your time to visit the new works of Artur Zmijewski at Kalmar Konstmuseum,

opening on Saturday with an artist talk. When I first met his work at Zamek Ujazdowski,  Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, in the beginning of 2000, I was fascinated and engaged, could not stop thinking about them.  You will not either.

A few years ago he was part of a video-screening at Uppsala Konstmuseum where I had chosen

nine artists from Poland.  But I will never forget his three large video-installations in the exhibition SAFE which I curated in 2005 for Karlskrona. It was his first large presentation in Sweden

and opened a week before his installation for the Venice Biennale.

After describing the special place for his installation we decided to show “KR WP”, “The Game of Tag” and “Do it yourself” which was a cooperation with Pawel Althamer.  The exhibition place was

the fortification of Godnatt (Goodnight) in the archipelago. No island to be standing on, just a ferry taking you out to this fortified secret building in the middle of the sea, letting you in and leaving you there. A dream for an artist and an exhibition producer.  A place to get lost in, a labyrinth of paths, darkness, winding staircases and echoes.

The video-installations were as tailor-made for this place. It was both a physical experience and a melt-down for your mind.

Don’t miss the chance to see his new works.

Far-out fables

Fabulous fantasies

Fathomless far-seeing folk-tales

Figures in flux,

frail and firm

Fuse fizzy and fire

Fuse form and film

Find fascinating fragments

further and farther

Featuring

fee-faw-fum

Fly!

Writing text for the DVD-catalogue for Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans, to their solo show at Malmö Konstmuseum.  I was just writing down words that came into my mind after visiting their studio earlier this week. Suddenly saw all the words in Swedish,  words beginning with the letter “F” (but meaning something else than F-words), wondering what first letter would come up if I wrote it in English.

Spunk starts next summer with an installation in the forests of Flisby. Ideas, thoughts and plans will take their first form on the spot. Smaller projects will take place before that and a seminar will be held later. Regional and local cooperators are ready, now it’s time for the national arena to get involved.  I close my eyes and imagine the scenario when the first people arrive…

One hour before deadline the application about Art Line was submitted to the South Baltic Cross Border Programme in the end of May.  48 pages and a lot of questions answered. Did I learn something new? Yes, lots and lots. And, it’s interesting to know more about EU-strategies and goals. Now to the sad part - we must wait around four months for the decision.

Art Line is a three year project to start up a network of art institutions in the South Baltic Region for cooperation, with two essential lines to follow.

1. The Digital Art Platform is a digital public arena for exchange in experimentation and artistic practices in digital media. It is a cooperation between artists, the academy, art institutions and  digital media experts.

2. Crossmedia works with art and digital media in the borderland between digital and “real” world. Through exhibitions, workshops, seminars, public projects and digital media art competitions we explore what public art can be if we connect the digital with a physical public place. The events will

be developed as a cooperation between art institutions, artists, laboratories and technicians in digital media.

Who are the engaged partners and associated partners?

Blekinge Museum

Laznia CCA, Gdansk

Gdansk City Gallery

Kalmar Konstmuseum

Kunsthalle Rostock

Kulturcentrum Ronneby

Baltic Sea Cultural Centre, Gdansk

Blekinge Institute of Technology

Kaliningrad NCCA

Galeria EL, Elblag

Karlskrona Konsthall

Vilnius Art Academy

And, for all events that will take place on the ferry between Sweden and Poland,

our new associated partner is Stena Line.

Keep your fingers crossed and hope for Art Line to get through the small passage into EU.

What a week! Fantastic work of Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli, building their space for their interactive computer installation. Constructors of virtual and "real" rooms at the same time.

1500 visitors during opening!

Thanks for all e-mails from all over the world last week, I feel warm in my heart.

I had 1500 visitors on my blog and web during a few days last week, which makes me so glad.

All works in the exhibition are amazing. Thank you, thank you, all the great artists of "Tales from the forest".

Starting up an exciting week!

The very best part of being a curator.

To hang the exhibition. To see all works in the space. To try out combinations.

In the evening Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson will arrive in Virserum to start their installation. They will show an interactive computer installation as well as large lenticular prints for the adjacent walls when you enter the exhibition.

Lots of technique this time, which is in the good hands of the technician Björn Olsson. On Thursday it should be ready for the press to see and on Sunday it opens to the public.

Take a look under the exhibition “Tales from the Forest” to read and see more about the artists and their work. Proud to present Bill Viola, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Maria Duncker, Hanna Ljungh, Gibson/Martelli (Igloo), Levi van Veluw, Maria Friberg, Tova Mozard, Maarit Suomi-Väänänen, Bo Christian Larsson, Anita Malmqvist and Ari Saarto.

The exhibition will be up and running until December, so if you can't make it to the opening, take a Småland-tour during Summer.

A game of chess has been used as a metaphor for life in our cultural history many times. In the video work “Nummer twaalf” by the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve we follow the sound of piano keys, which each follows a move on a chessboard – a chess-piano! The chess Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin constructed this match and used the challenge of the King’s Gambit as a known opening. The opponent accepts and in the end – a stalemate. It does not mean that one player is in check, but there are simply no more moves to be made.

We zoom and slide slowly from one game of chess, to several in the same room, where also a chamber orchestra is playing. We continue slowly to zoom out to a hermits cottage and see a man sitting or standing in vast deserted nature.

The volcano Eyjafjallajökull  on Iceland is wild and active since some weeks, but the volcano Mount St. Helen in this video keeps still. The threat of eruption is present in the video, although the silence. The other nature scene is the enormous 1300 kilometer long and rough San Andreas Fault, which is close to an earthquake of large magnitude according to studies.  A deceptive calm.

Each move on the chessboard is spelled out on the film, in the nature,  as a coordinate. As  if it were longitudes and latitudes or some other secret code message.

A lonely man keeps counting the stars. Never comes to a summary.

The sun finally sets and a day is over.

The installation sends references to romantic ideas and the idea of artists as hermit. Still it has a tickling nerve. I just had to stay to see it all, forty minutes in the video room at Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, New York, earlier this year.

Chance, moments, calculations.

Infinity and the sublime, who can resist?

Guido van der Werve is trained as a classical musician. Came to think about artists’ book “Chords 1-17” (and the exhibition seven years ago). The Swedish artist Anders Krisár has also trained as a classical pianist. Sharp photographs from heavenly and deserted shores and each photograph accompanied by a composed piano chord. There is an ominous and dark undertone in both photo and chord. Despite the beautiful scenery, an awareness of something else comes creeping upon us.

Didn’t I start up with writing about chess…and blogs should be short…this is probably not a blog. Too long and not updated enough times during a week.

Have you seen any of the amazing Medieval paintings by Albertus Pictor in churches around Stockholm? Stories for people who could not read Latin, stories for the priest to recall what to say? Death plays chess with a knight in the most famous painting by Albertus Pictor in the church of Täby. The walls were whitewashed during the 1700th Century, and we can be glad that someone couldn’t reach up to cover the ceiling and this story.

Death says on a text-ribbon by the painting: I play you checkmate.  Ingmar Bergman was inspired by this painting when creating the film scene in “The Seventh Seal” (Det sjunde Inseglet) where Death approaches the knight Antonius Block on the seashore and Block asks: You have come for me?

Death: I have been for a long time at your side.

Block: I know.

Death: Are you prepared?

Block: My body is afraid, but I am not.

(Death approaches Block)

Block: Wait a moment.

Death: You all say that. But I give no respite.

Block: You play chess, do you not? … As long as I resist you, I live. If I win, you set me free.

For the Swedish reader you can continue to read an article by the chess-player and author Kristian Fredén, April 20^th in Svenska Dagbladet on chess as a game of art.

http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/understrecket/ett-spel-med-manga-drag-av-konstnarlighet_4587201.svd

He writes about Marcel Duchamps who once expressed that his existence appeared like a game of chess to him.  And about Kasparov whose book is called “How Life imitates Chess” , where he states that chess is mostly a struggle, but it contains a creative process that is related to the artists.

To be creative - within a set of frames - and break out from.

Why do people carry on playing analogue chess? Fredén writes that the answer might be in the mixture of absolute clarity and mysticism, in the way one have to use both calculations and intuition?

I remember the feeling of holding a heavy wooden chessman, moving it on a board designed by the Russian chess master Gary Kasparov. In our store “Remi”, with the characteristic black-and white squares in the logotype, we had parlor games and home computers like Amiga, Atari and Commodore. Many years ago. But this particular board had a special charisma. It was during the time when humans still could win against the chess-machines, human minds were brilliant in comparison.

Still, intuition is for humans.

And yes, it was during the time of little Super Mario-Bros and his friends, when computer games were babies in comparison to the teenager-games of today.

Should the area be for people, traffic, waterfront views, architectural inventions or include everything at the same time? The debate about the area ”Slussen” has been going on for a long time.  It is an important silhouette and traffic facility in Stockholm. Now it is in bad conditions after more than seventy years of use and in need for new urban design and renewal of the entire infrastructure. The new master plan has been shown until some weeks ago in the information office of the City of Stockholm.

I wonder where the small Slussen-trolls have gone now? In a big rectangular artists’ book with the title “Sluss-Trollen Rull” an unknown artist has created a story around trolls, or rather a small family of cars. The book is printed in serigraphy, by the hands of Malte Axelsson.  Modernistic with constant bold perspectives and views. In a very special colour-scale - I can still smell the pigments from the prints from 1963. Ash-grey, arsenic, Bleu de France, blue gray together with brick red, citrine, bubble-gum and dark champagne.

The family “Rull” or “Roll” lives in Slussen and love their small world. People never see them because humans are only thinking of themselves. A transparent tunnel-ghost called “Thin” also lives there and tells the family stories about the world outside. The family is often found by a gas station, drinking petrol. Little “Rush” likes to blend the petrol with oil – although that’s not good for your figure. “Rally” enjoys to rally around for hours and hours, but the trolls also likes to turn off the engines just to watch other cars and inhale the lovely smell of petrol. Fresh air is more of a nasty smell.  They love technique, moving stairways and all their multi-faceted relatives with different engines, colours, sizes and shapes that rolls the streets both day and night.

If you want to see and read more about the plans to lure the trolls out of Slussen:

http://www.stockholm.se/slussen and see films and photos, follow the link “In English” for text.

Do you know the circle is the female symbol when you are about to enter the toilets in Poland?                 

 - You should go in where there is a circle on the door, my five year old daughter told me when we moved to Poland and I was standing outside a public toilet, shilly-shally as to go in through the door with a circle or the door with a triangle. Under the protest of my daughter I pulled the handle of the triangle-door - and ran into a surprised man. The very simple solution of the connection between a nude woman and a triangle had lured me inside. When consulting symbols and their meanings, I learned that the triangle that points upward is about the spiritual and male world and the one pointing downwards is about the old stuff: the alliance between women, nature and body. But, on the toilet door telling us about natural needs, this triangle is meant for men. I’d rather think about this theft of the triangle as a secret hint about equality. In Poland women are granted the universal symbol for eternity and entirety instead. And, on a location frequently visited.                                                                                                                                                 –How did you know that I should enter the circle-room? I asked my daughter full of admiration.                   

 – I saw two girls coming out earlier, she answered.

Long introduction to something about round buildings. Below is a picture of one round building in the harbour of Gdynia that I’d love to make an art project on/in/under/with. So delicate by the quay. The other one is a red round house on stilts in the inner harbour of Baltimore, like a shining jewel by the waterline.

A few evenings ago I listened to speech on architecture and urban planning as artistic process. The architect Thomas Hellquist, professor at Blekinge Institute of Technology, showed pictures from a Parisian suburb where they’ve added an enormous round facade on a building, as well as a round large inner yard. The spatial planning of the area repeated these round forms in road-plans and in other buildings and the contrasts between round and straight lines was visible.

There is now a debate in Stockholm about the plans to build a round house on high pillars on the large inner yard of the district of blocks called “Plankan” from the sixties. It would house more apartments and a pond but also spread less light to the existing apartments.

When giving a lecture to students at Spatial Planning at BTH today I spoke about artistic interventions and ideas for public space. When walking outside I saw the new round building soon ready. The former military and orderly area has now got a revolutionary diagonal road and a round building.  Merry go round round round.

“”We Like America and America Likes Us” is a video projected onto the front window of a white Cadillac showing now at the Whitney Biennial. It’s an ambulance-limousine-like car, used in the film “Ghostbusters” once upon a time. Bruce High Quality Foundation, an anonymous group of artists, has rewritten the quote "I Like America & America Likes Me" by Joseph Beuys as title for their work. The United States as Beuys met in the seventies and the one this group describes differs and so does their works. Clips from media, You Tube, news, movies roll over us and create melancholy, sadness and love at the same time.

They make the Brucennial at the same time as the Whitney Biennial, but as they state: Harder. Better Faster. Stronger. The theme Miseducation “brings together 420 artists from 911 countries working in 666 discrete disciplines to reclaim education as part of an artist's ongoing practice beyond the principals of any one institution or experience.”  The group” aspires to invest the experience of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man’s desiring.”  They have started their own free art school, yes, who dares to take part? Take a look at their website, participate and laugh out loud at some formulations and projects.  www.thebrucehighqualityfoundation.com

55 artists are chosen by the curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, a lot fewer than earlier years. Can be great if each artist get more space and room. Until the end of May one can visit the Whitney Biennial and there are some works worth staying longer together with.  Altogether the show is kind of silent and cautious. But boring is the last expression one can use for the furious and desperate installation by Kate Gilmore who struggles to get out of a self-made tower wearing a polka-dot dress and high-heels. With muscles and high-heel shoes she crashes the tower bit by bit.

Will we obey the direct orders of Marianne Vitale who welcomes us to the future of Neutralism in her video “Patron”? In a monologue that reminds you of manifestos from early modernist movements she performs as a poet and a sergeant in the military at the same time. What surreal or nonsense sentences can one say loud in an authoritarian manner?

Totally different and poetic is ”Parole”, a video installation by Sharon Hayes where I at first thought I saw political speeches on the streets, then performances by different people, and then ended up hearing love letters being read? Fiction and documentary, you can’t be sure. Is it about persons or societies? You can shift in between seeing and listening, the voices embrace you in the room and you yourself become an active participant when moving around in the small space.

Or, the film- and video- installation of Kerry Tribe showing a man with a memory which lasts only twenty seconds. After a brain-surgery in the fifties he can’t remember anything dated longer back than a few seconds. What is a life without a memory? Existential and ephemeral about human life.

I’m glad to have the opportunity to see “Collecting Biennials” with over fifty works from earlier biennials in thoughtful combinations.  As different works as the bulimic “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid” and “The Wages Of Sin” by Mike Kelley with the soft stuffed animals, figures, toys  and dried corn in a monumental presentation placed by the wax candles – and  the minimalistic golden iconic almost-painting on wood by Sherrie Levine.  A game or a secret pattern? No, these works are not presented in the same room.

The museum guard makes it a trick to stand still close behind the sculpture of a reading “Woman with dog” by Duane Hanson from the seventies. He says he is happy to have the company of her, the inflatable toilet by Claes Oldenburg and the early “$199 Television” by Andy Warhol. I stay for a long time together with the poetic painting of a heater by Vija Celmins’ from the sixties in the same room.

Bill Viola, USA

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Finland

Maria Duncker, Finland

Hanna Ljungh, Sweden

Igloo. Bruno Martelli och Ruth Gibson, Britain

Levi van Veluw, The Netherlands

Maria Friberg, Sweden

Tova Mozard, Sweden

Maarit Suomi-Väänänen, Finland

Bo Christian Larsson, Germany                                                           

Anita Malmqvist, Sweden

Ari  Saarto, Finland

Tales from the Forest

Virserums Konsthall May 9th - December 5th 2010

An exhibition about the forest in the outskirts of our consciousness, the forest of our memories and fantasies. We spend less and less time in the forest and sometimes it appears as unreal or even frightening. Is the forest a part of our everyday life – do we use it as our living room? Many children never spend time in the woods, but rather in virtual worlds where they feel safely connected to others. We experience nature on the television where it doesn’t smell, feel or taste anything. Yet, the woods and the trees have a powerful symbolic force and meaning. Can we listen to the tales and incantations of the forest in an increasingly nature-dystopian world where the forest isn’t the lasting? Can the forest function as a metaphor for life? To get lost, to merge, to transform into or disappear into the forest? Where is the border between the wild and the arranged? Memories, dreams, visions and reality mingles. What it the relation between human and nature? An exhibition with suggestive features and with different stories about and from a magic, surreal, poetic or strange forest within and beyond us. What place do you and I have?

I'm really glad about this exhibition, can't wait to unpack, hang works, try out videos in their rooms or place.  

A short text in Swedish is on my website under "Utställningar", take a look.

Take a look at the blog for the Crossmedia Program:

www.crossmedia-bth.se

New course plans ready!

Application deadline April 15th.

Blekinge Institute of Technology.

I wish all blog-readers of Artland a Happy Easter with some Easter eggs from Poland!

At MoMA one can see Broadway Boogie Woogie, a painting by Piet Mondrian from the 40ties.

He clearly saw the rhythm of the streets of New York. I make up my own dance-moves, and they seem to lead me in not so straight lines as his.

I saw and read a poem by Howard Horowitz, crowded letters in the poem create the form of Manhattan. Also gave an idea of straight lines.

My geographic dyslexia leads me in the wrong direction time after time, especially when I get up from the Metro. After some days I realize that I should not trust my instincts, but walk in the opposite direction if I want to get where I intended to go. Probably I unconsciously want to go beyond the boundaries of the map?

Why? To come closer to the maps over the brain, dreams, body, mind?

Take the opportunity to be a part of a performance with Marina Abramovic at MoMA.

Until the end of May you can see her solo show and also participate in her new performance. We are invited to sit on a chair in front of her and look into the eyes of one another, no movement, just stillness. Heavy lights lit up the area at MoMA.

People tend to talk more quietly around, move more carefully. Look at the performance from the balconies at every floor. See the performance close or further away.  Simple and intensive. You can choose to sit with her as short or long as you want to.

Just be present here and now. Something most people find difficult, we are often on our way to see, do, say something more- is there an exciting experience behind the corner that we might miss? Marina Abramovic invites us not to achieve something, but be present here and now, in our minds, and let our thoughts wander away.

You can watch her earliest performances, re-made by other artists during the exhibition. It is impressing to see a large presentation of her work in different media, that spans over more than forty years!

The last days in New York made me a wet art enthusiast when storms, lightning and rain hit the streets of New York. I used up two umbrellas - and I was not alone.

The rain made me stay longer at each exhibition, hesitating to go outside again. And, yes, it was great to give the exhibitions more time and thought.

Just beside MoMA there is a museum not to miss for those interested in self-taught artists and their works. At American Folk Art Museum you can spend many hours watching some of the works from their extensive collection of 5000 art works. They also have a collection of just as many works by Henry Darger, obsession and creating of an own world. The clouds are ominous.  Small girls from a fairy-tale release a lot of rats out and people in uniform bow to them from a stage.  Dragons lure in a cave, but the girls walk together as a powerful force and don’t even give them a notice.

Darger collected images from comic strips, children’s books, colouring books, games. Reality, real imagined worlds, fantasy in an intriguing mix.

Henry Darger has a special study-center at the museum, the energetic director and curator Brooke Davis Anderson told me during our meeting. Recently they produced an exhibition called “Dargerism” where contemporary artists interacted with his work.  I follow a group of teenagers, who have chosen one art piece each and then present this work from their personal viewpoint, what it tells them. The guards on every floor tell you extra information about the exhibition or art works.

The economical life of a private museum in USA is a tough one.  Fund-raising galas, knowledge of who visits the museum, corporate sponsorship, individual memberships, funding from different foundations and government means a lot of hard work. And yes, Brooke Davis Anderson has Swedish ancestors.