ARTLAND

Some spring-photos to celebrate Easter and the come-back of sunshine!

If you happen to be in Baltimore soon, don’t miss the Kinetic Sculpture Race.

Every year the amazing American Visionary Art Museum's arranges this parade. The self-made vehicles and their entourage moves though the streets, on the water and into mud. Imaginative, inventive, intensive. Workshops are arranged on the museum in beforehand for those who would like help in construction. The winning vehicle is not the first one over the finishing line, but the one which arrives somewhere in the middle. This year it is on May 3^rd.

I share one photo from my visit last year. If you are in Baltimore, don’t miss the museum, it is a one-of-a-kind-museum of visionary art.  You bring it with you in mind and thought for a long time.

The architect of Kunsthalle Rostock travelled to Louisiana to get inspiration in the sixties.  The city art gallery of Rostock was built in the end of 1960 in a park, almost like the museum of Modern Art in Denmark, but by a lake instead of the sea.

It was the first modern contemporary art gallery in DDR and it opened with grand ideas of an international program under the motto “Tor zur Welt”. The large windows with a view to the park, a beautiful inner courtyard and spacious rooms in several floors creates the impression of a little sister to Louisiana. Their collection hosts paintings, sculpture and graphic art, a lot from the DDR-times, but it also spans back from 1920 and forth.

The Baltic Sea-Biennial (Ostsee/Mare Balticum) was created here in the 80ties and 90ties, and now our co-operation within Art Line will awaken the idea of art in the Baltic region again, despite the tough economic times.

Here are some photos from Art Line meetings in Rostock Kunsthalle. On the photos are project coordinator Kristina Koebe, director Uwe Neumann, curator Ulrich Ptak, curator Agnieszka Wolodzko from CCA Laznia, curator Martin Schibli from Kalmar Konstmuseum and Art Line crew Annika Thelin and Aje Björkman.

A cardboard with a few holes was tied to a tree-trunk in the centre of Rostock. When getting closer I discovered that there was paper tied to many trees. When coming even closer one could see a hand-written text saying “Hilfe!”, as if a note from the trees themselves. When almost tipping over the small valley one could see their friends, already sawn off.

Here’s a photo of an important machine.

When using it a wonderful smells spreads in the neighbourhood. Not many have the strength to resist.

Since the spring is reluctant, we have to rely on this machine.

Can you guess what it does?

With it you bake the cones, awaiting to be filled with Italian ice-cream…

The blue anemones are in bloom under the giant oak-tree but hardly visible in the thick fog of today.

When in Poland the last two times I met sunshine and warmth and I expect Germany to salute the spring when it’s time to take the ferry over this week.

In a performative art project taking place at the City Gallery of Gdansk, the artist Iwona Zajac is letting young students transform her. Every third day she also invites an artist to create an installation on one wall of the gallery, in dialogue with her project.

The Ideal Lab is a project Iwona Zajac has been working on since 2008. This time it’s students working in her studio at the Gdansk shipyard, “The Young Crew”, who re-make, re-create and change Zajac into an ideal woman. Or, try out different ideals for women, ideals flooding over media.

In what seems like a never-ending make-over-mania in magazines and TV, you need to change to become a person of significance. The message is easy to understand. I thought it was an April fools' joke when I read that a handbook “All you need to know about surgical operations” was published in Sweden. Such an everyday title. Could have been “All your need to know about Italian cooking” or “All you need to know about travelling in Spain”.

I come to think about the video “Doll-clothes” from 1975 where Cindy Sherman dresses herself up in different clothes, in a paper cut-out-doll-manner. She gets out of her flat plastic pocket in an album and realizes, like Eva, that she is naked.  After picking a dress she dances around on a chest of drawers, when large hands seize her and put her back into the album again. Watch technique from the beginning of the video-technique-era for artists, still of present interest:  http://vodpod.com/watch/1092523-cindy-sherman-doll-clothes-1975

Gdansk Galeria Miejska is open a few days more for this project, until April 8. Here you can also cuddle up in a small dark video-room with wall-paintings.

If you are not in Gdansk this last week of the project, you can see a permanent work of hers - one of Zajac' murals can be seen during a visit at the Contemporary Art Centre Laznia. In the staircase on the highest floor you can even meet her in a self-portrait, or is it maybe her own mother? You can’t be sure since the mural is about the relation between herself and her mother. Still, one white spot on the murals remains, but the work is soon to be finished Zajac and curator Agnieszka Wolodzko says.

An installation by the young Gdansk artist Justyna Kuklo is placed in an intimate  corner by itself. “My grandmothers table” consists of a low round table with an embroidered table-cloth. “Circles”  are made in the old handicraft bobbin lace, or pillow lace, from which detailed and intricate patterns can be done. Extremely  time-consuming work.

The pink nuances of the embroidered pattern  are visible through the transparent glass tea-cups which are turned upside down over these parts of the table-cloth, as if to catch and keep them in place. The lace-parts are outside of the cups. The embroidered motifs are the secrets and intimate talks in between women of different generations getting together and sharing thoughts over a cup of tea or some handicraft. If you look closer you see embroidered genitals, a uterus and other sexual facts of life.

The installation is part of the exhibition Laznia Damska, The Women’s bathhouse, which started on March 8^th at Contemporary Art Centre Laznia in Gdansk and is one of their ongoing exhibitions. This spacious art gallery was a bathhouse from the beginning. Every year CCA Laznia presents several women artists from the Gdansk-area starting off at International Women's Day. In Poland it is a festive day and the celebration of economic, political and social achievements of women is vivid. History, presence  and future in one day. Justyna Kuklo compress the time by speaking to her grandmother and mother, and giving both them and other women a tribute to their silent homework.

Justyna Kuklo started at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk in the Department of Painting and this is her graduation work for Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles last year. During summer 2008 she participated in the performance of the artists’ group Plaj when taking part of “Neighbours”.  Dancers and painters co-operated in creating new space, time and absolute presence.  See photos and text under “Utställningar/Neighbours – Grannar - Sasiedzi” on this website.

- I know only 35 movements, she says in a frail silent start of the performance “Unknown pleasures”. She dances some of the movements, and state their number at the same time. She compares the repetition it to our existence.

- And, the movements are not even mine! she continues. Somebody else invented them, I just repeat them. We smile and see the abyss at the same time.

-The evil eye, for instance, she says. Her mutual understanding and agreement with the audience changes. She distances herself from us by looking at us with dangerous eyes while swirling around in her dance-moves. It is a play, an act.

- So many messages! one of the actors exclaims over and over again. He is constantly surprised by all the ideas Michael Jackson spread in his videos. In a hilarious flow and mix of monologue and dance he tries to explain and understand where Michael Jackson got all his great ideas from, but always end up with “-I have no idea.”. The figure in the play repeats and live through the acts of the music-videos. The audience laugh and gulps at the same time.

The other dancers/actors are trying to catch our attention, but “Michael Jackson” speeds on. He does not hear anybody else, the others are only allowed to be actors in his run-through of the plots.  It’s lonely up on the stage for the others. She wants to please us and smiles. We don’t know whom to look at. The woman holds up A4:s with the names of birds to the other man on stage:  “chaffinch”, and he whistles and imitates. The “Who’s bad”-lyrics is heard from “Michael Jackson”. The tempo is speeded. Next, the turtle dove, and “Who’s bad?”. The nightjar screams and screams, MJ sings higher -Who’s bad? And it all turns out like a crazy duel.

One actor performs long dialogues from movies, for instance Wim Wenders “Paris, Texas”, played from a jukebox on stage. A giant inflatable bottle of the body fluid gall perform a dance and becomes deflated. If you had too much of the black gall in your body you became melancholic the idea was in antiquity. Here the gall is with mango-taste. A giant rabbit rides the automatic amusement-park-elephant. A man and a woman, sometimes behind masks, nods and nods in the same pace.

“Haunted dancehall” and “Music for a darkened theatre” are the first parts of the trilogy which ends with ” Unknown pleasures”. The scenography is a deserted fairground, a former amusement park. Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber are one of a kind in Sweden in creating a very special mix of performance, theatre, interaction, drama, dance and art.

It is unpredictable.

About longing and belonging,

perishable transient life.

Our memories and the archives of our lives.

The disappearance of all memories.

Two beckoning cats, the ones we usually meet with their upright paws moving at a Chinese restaurant stands by the nodding couple on the counter in front of the paste-balloon-wall. Maybe they wish us good luck while waving goodbye as the stage turns dark.

A voice says: We learned how to evaporate. How to come to nothing.

The solo-presentation of Oscar Guermouche at Kalmar Konstmuseum is pumping male adrenaline and creating a slick white orderly space aesthetics at the same time. It is coherent, albeit or because of these opposites.

In a video triptych the artist assembles and dissembles his weapon AK5 with a green sack over his head. Associations to the sack lead to Guantanamo and captivity, but the artist is wearing a suit and do it freely. The suit, the other male traditional uniform signals something else. The two other parts show the artist performing push-ups and the other let us follow the movements during inspections of soldiers. It is interesting to think about the relation between structures in the military service and the society as an entirety. The videos are tied together symbolically in the form of a triptych.

How to construct a male identity?

The title ”Ordnung muss sein” sound like a quotation from a German WWII-soldier, but is taken from the Swedish ranger regiment where Oscar Guermouche did his military service.

In “Männerphantasien” texts describing the male body is being transcribed with traditional oil-paint onto white canvases in size 150 by 120 cm, filling the long walls of the museum. The fragments are taken from literature, written by men. Following the conceptual heritage. Existential writers like Jean-Paul Sartre share space with detective stories, adventure novels or famous classical writers like Alexandre Dumas or Ernest Hemingway. The texts are full of admiration and lust for the male body, written by men only.

Other parts of the exhibition relate to pornography collected from the internet and saved as an archive with labels on computer discs. “We want to go to Moscow” is a work with painted text on Swedish flags, taken from marching songs and other information given to soldiers in the Swedish ranger regiment. Connecting the dots between sexuality, erection and warfare.

The small triptych of male environments from a sports centre borrow form from constructivism. As spectator you immediately fill the space with content. It is a hard sad environment.

Urinals in straight lines. Marcel Duchamps in duplication. 

Pipes for water to the showers in a lonesome pattern on the white glazed tiles.

Everyday environments, shaping us into citizens.

And here we are. It is 2011.

How to be Bruce Willis and at the same time drag a stroller with a baby?

How to go blindfolded through the toy-stores full of dark warrior-attributes for young boys?

Think of the Lego-toys made by Zbigniew Libera. How to train a child.

How do we construct male identity and how do we relate to it? What are the connecting dots in society - can we find it in literature, film, internet, pornography, military service?

How to skip the stereotypes?

I came to think about recent films about war, since civil wars are on my mind and in the news every day now. Armadillo is a documentary about Danish soldiers going to Afghanistan to the British-Danish army base with the same name, Armadillo. A film by the Danish filmmaker Janus Metz. I had to see it in parts, since it is painful to follow how war affects people. Understanding and sympathy for the civilians from the beginning slowly changes into a more coarsen view on people, the people they are there to protect. To become indifferent might be one way of surviving the impossible task. The soldiers play war-games and watch pornography in their spare-time. They give candy to children and sometimes pay inhabitants money when they happen to kill their animals. Worse is to experience when civilians are killed by Danish grenades.

I also recall the documentary about lawless Somalia, where another Danish journalist, Rasmus Krath, finds and interviews pirates in a pirate-village in Somalia. In the streets you see men and their weapons. Women don’t live their life in public, they work hard with domestic duties.  It’ s a man’s world. Created by many years without a functioning government, police-force or judicial system. Rasmus Krath brings six kilo of banknotes with him. As a foreigner you have to be guarded by mercenaries. Kidnapping and killings seem more everyday and ordinary than the opposite. Most men chew khat.

I wrote down the explanation why one of the men was chewing khat.

- It adjusts the brain a little.

Makes one become more indifferent?

Explanations on why war are necessary.

Explanations on why men have to be in a certain way to be real men.

All explanations do the same:

It adjusts the brain.

But still don’t make any sense.

Everyday apartment with a twist.

Black bulbs in bracket lamp on the back wall, and mirrors in between.

What happens if you turn the lights on the black ones?

No function?

Not working?

A transparent bulb is placed under a small three-legged table.

On the table is a lamp stand without a bulb.

This bulb is turned on and is shining from under the rim – it’s on a heated race with the sun.

Real or surreal, stillness as in the idea of a bourgeois apartment, with something worrying underlying.

The title is a Swedish word I can’t translate into English. Eftervaro.

To be together, but after something.

After we have left in the evening.

A presence of something.

Or, the opposite to presence?

Can you keep a secret?

There is place for a monologue, a speech.

Just wait until the right moment.

The beginning or the end of a story from a living-quarter? The enigmatic  and surrealistic interior of a sparsely decorated apartment makes you wonder what has happened.

Lisa Gerdin will show her installation at Galleri C Hjärne in Helsingborg for another week. Possible to see day and night through the window. A room of one’s own or for a ghost visitors?

Scale 1:1. Please feel welcome to enter my apartment and have a look. The frail drawing lines and the monumental scale create the space by Anna Brag. Drawings fill the room from floor to ceiling. One enters the private sphere of one Chinese and one Swedish apartment. Drawings overlap and projections make parts of the walls in constant movement. Last day at Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg.

Rabbits in fairy-tales are sweetish pinkish softish creatures. Marianne Lindberg de Geer has created five grey polished monumental stone-rabbits, quintuplets - and as if a giant child walked by and accidentally dropped them, or got tired of playing with them, they are standing or lying on the large empty square in Helsingborg. Frozen in their relations. Scenes from an everyday drama. The game is over for the moment, the figurines are waiting for a draw. They want out of their bodies, they want out, hit the road, break the rules, and crack the façade! May rabbits scream?

No public map will tell you about this place, but if you know where to start in the nature reserve Kullaberg, on the coast of the region Skåne, you just follow the yellow “N:s” or “Nimis” painted on tree-trunks. As you walk downwards and it gets steeper and steeper, you can hear the sound of the artist Lars Vilks hammering on his installation Nimis. Since 1981 he has been creating and re-creating his work build by pieces of tree-branches, planks, battens and things which has landed there after a journey on the sea.

No photo can make it justice. The work is about the whole site, the whole walk there, the sea and the horizon, the colours and the sounds which make a total impression. The feeling of the branches worn and touched by many people. The movements in passageways and into portals you don’t know where they lead. The insecurity if it is going to hold you. The massive time and engagement involved.

The flags on top of the towers flaps in the hard wind and the micro-nation Ladonia survives. An independent state with own currency, queen and ministers and national anthems. Latin is spoken and presidents chosen. You may join Ladonia for free, but should know Ladonia is at war with Sweden.

The book “Arx” close by is built by stones from the beach and concrete. It’s “pages” are written into the stones, as well as “theory” and “post-theory”-  The silhouette of towers make the book look like a castle in the late afternoon sun.

Feels like the sea is about to swallow entire Nimis today. The power of the sea makes your body aware and alert. The waves are enormous.

The towers pile up in graphical forms towards the sky.

Nimis is monumental and frail at the same time.

Chaos and order.

Hommage to constant creation.

Fugit irreparable tempus.

It crackles, crunches, creaks, cracks.

You get aware of your own body when you raise your hand to draw away the black curtain to get outside of the video-room after watching the video-work “Elements” by Magnus Wallin at Elastic. The white walls stings like the bees, or the eyes?, which swirls around the skeleton-muscle figures.

In a digital world anything can happen.

The sound immerses itself into you.

A dance-macabre, pick and choose your body-parts as in a candy store, construct your own body,

take off your legs and use your lungs as ears.

There is no stillness, only constant movements and new forms, constant change and transformation.

Science, bio-technology, computer games, dystopias come to your mind.

Natural history museums, death and re-birth.

Skeletons, muscles.

A still-life in motion.

A merry-go-around vanitas.

Faster and faster in a world without end,

or maybe the opposite.

Noora and Kimmo Schroderus are having a play with scale and models in their exhibition at Galleri 21 in Malmö. We bow to see the small white furniture and interiors Noora Schroderus has built in doll-houses and to meet the miniature people. Her soft tools in pastel-colours surrounds the techno- and sport car-inspired models by Kimmo Schroderus. They are loaded with energy and intensive colour and hope to one day become a large-scale sculpture.

I got a great gift from one of my daughters this Christmas. A voucher with the text:

“I will accompany you on museum and art exhibition visits during one entire day. You can see as much as you like, I will accompany you.”

I have already used the voucher, while spending a day in Malmö. At Malmö Konsthall we saw the exhibition by the Los Angeles based Walead Beshty  – a diagram of forces - and the rediscovered photography, photograms and photoplastics of Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, classic works and reminders of the Bauhaus school. We watched experiments in light, reflections and transparency. We observed objects which had travelled over the world to Malmö with FedEx, now broken, frail and with finger-prints by many hands carrying the square volumes in different materials. We saw avant-garde film, and people and things from new angles and perspectives. Read about the interest Lászlo Moholy-Nagy had in how the photographic technique in itself could help him create his work, while Beshty let the movers of his objects create his work. Tried to take photographs, but it is forbidden at Malmö Konsthall. Instead I took pics from inside- and ouside of the toilet, hopefully not forbidden.

Thoughts about time, space and volume, while peeping through the cracks in the mirror-boxes.

- Let’s go to the science-fiction-bookstore, she said patiently when taking off the headphones after listening to voices on an LP far away in time.

Another child than the western child on a heap of toys by Maria Friberg, inhabits a symbolic corner of the old Art academy-building during the Market art fair. Knutte Wester has created an installation beside and in companion with the giant old sculptures of the house. Moses with his stone tablet with the ten commandments functions as the protector of the girl. A young girl stands in the corner, with her eyes closed and slightly bent back by burdens. She has been cast in bronze, a classical material which will see to that the sculpture will last for eternity. A video documenting the processes behind the work is also there.

Knutte Wester is engaged in social interaction in all of his work, whether it is with homeless people, elderly people or children in an orphanage in Riga, as here. The joint creation of work is part of his process.

In Latvia historical monuments are attributed to the occupying power of other countries. Public space has not been the living-room of sculptures talking other languages than power.

In the orphanages of Riga thousands of children are raised. When they grow older and have to leave, there is no network to help them. They want to be part of a family, and society. Knutte Wester has made a cast of all seven-year-old children at an orphanage and assembled different parts of them to one sculpture.

A monument for all the waiting children.

“These children are part of the contemporary history of Latvia. But nobody will commission a monument over them. So we do it ourselves. A monument without a home.” Knutte Wester writes.

I believe that art can change the world, at least little by little.

For instance by giving these children a voice in, and a part of, society.

The old Art Academy-building creates an atmosphere of art history, a solemn and academic air, only by the place. The art works gets more space though and it is room for some presentations in larger scale. Some artists do their best to trash this conception of a fine room for the eternal arts. In the staircase, signaling power, Bo Christian Larsson has created an installation which undermines the aura of the place.

He has developed his own myths and landscapes in his work, often recalling subcultures. It’s full of mysterious parts. Seems to be waiting for someone special. As if we stumbled upon the essence of something, but at the same time found something disquieting  about it. Where is the intruder? Did Alfred Hitchcock move into the Scandinavian spruce forest?

The wandering life of an artist and homesickness? “Hotel”, the architectural frail suitcase by Bo Christian Larsson is a magnet standing there on the floor to Galleri Bo Bjerggaard. Soon, we can see more of his work in a solo-presentation at Kristinehamns konsthall.

In the installation ”Las Palmas” Johannes Nyholm has built a beach with fabric. There is a tennis-playing couple and another pair sitting by a table and a parasol having a drink. All dolls created in textiles too. As in my reflection from February on parasols in art, there is also a parasol here. And a palm-tree. Johannes Nyholm started making a documentary about his one-year-old daughter Helmi and ended up letting her play around a build environment of a tourist-destination in the sun. She wakes up with clothes for a grown-up woman on, breaks into a bar where the same dolls as in the installation are guests and waiters.  She drinks and drinks, eat ice-cream, dances on the bar-disk and seems to have fun, until she falls asleep again. When she wakes up the staff wants to get paid, but she leaves on her motorcycle with the wind in her hair.

A photograph by Maria Friberg shows the back of a child, sitting on top of a giant mountain of toys, belongings of a child in our Western world.

A robotic miniature shopping trolley runs on a trail in the stand of Artillery and the invited Mnky Bizz Group. A flag is attached to it, saying “Shop til you drop” and is created by aka Tank/Lorena Monsalve from Colombia. In the shopping trolley we see a paper-coffin, produced to solemnly and humourosly take care of art that has passed its expiration date.

When coming to Supermarket the processes, the ideas and a place for experimental works creates the air you breathe. The money-market seems far away. Supermarket invites artist run-spaces and it is messy, chaotic, funny and serious at the same time.

Anika Weshinskey and Julie Upmeyer in the stand of Caravansarai from Istanbul share their thought on coming to Stockholm in snowy February. Why have a gathering in the coldest hour of the year? The question answers itself, because we need it in the darkest hour of the year.

They present “CaravansarAID Medical Tourism Bureau”, where they write prescriptions to you with recommendations to travel to Istanbul to get attacked or injured. After this you are being treated fine on a hospital and then help with grants and other benefits to get going again.

Nia Pushkarova at Gallery IME in Sofia, Bulgaria, organizes the Water tower art fest which presents art works in abandoned buildings and at the same time show the potential of deserted buildings. “(…) in a way we are evoking the communal clairvoyance for a more soulful urban way of life in conduct with different groups and ideas.”.

There is an open call for artists to suggest installations in specific buildings, open until April 15^th. Their stand at Supermarket is almost empty, with an alarming black-and yellow tape on the floor. There is a heap of papers on a table in front of the booth, where you can leave an application, for anything. It has to be written before you are allowed to enter.

The crazy violent funny sausage factory by Nationalgalleriet brings the French film “Delicatessen” to my mind. In the film there is a butcher-store in the middle of nowhere in a dark future with shortage of food. The building is full of apartments with people and this particular store does not lack meat. But where do all shop-assistants disappear?  “Nationalgalleriet got it all! Exiting fist fights, horror, politics, satire, sex (including nude scenes), magic, psychology, art, violence, slapstick and special effects.” they state.

The performer in white carries her large ticking clock around the space reminding us about time without saying a word.

The engaged artists collective "Tema”, International Experimental Art Action, from Lithuania has built a giant rectangular shape hanging freely from the ceiling. Enter if you dare, it’s worthwhile. It’s full of pictures and films inside, for instance you can watch the light-objects by Linas Kutavicius swimming swiftly in a river. Their industrial space in Klaipeda is open for all cultural experiments.

Anna Nawrot from Galeria Biala in Lublin, Poland, shows some of their impressing hundreds of realized projects since the middle of the 80-ties, many in the gallery, some outdoor like in the “Art Yard”. The documentation of her spatial installation of ties in different colours and patterns are monumental works of male customs and clothing restraints. Mariusz Tarkawian make drawings of all stands at Supermarket and put them up one by one on the walls. Danuta Kuciak take photographs of herself as a “wealthy girl”.

Yes, there is more…

The intimate and delicate, but yet powerful corner-installation by Helene Hortlund.

The slow-motion hares making love, not like rabbits though, on a round moving platform in a disco-bathroom-hidden-stage-feeling. Lars Brunström shapes the mechanical into a new nature.

Supermarket, yes.

A young man is polishing the cold stone-floor with napkins under his bare feet. It is winter cold in Stockholm, but inside Kulturhuset he felt free to take action. He stared behind me when talking.

At first I thought he was part of a performance-program, but after his speech on obligations and authorities I realized he was not. Or at least I think he was not. This man needed to clean the world and why not just start here and now?

Or get in tune with life?  

Men seldom take place in the drawings of Ragnar Persson. I could however have sworn I saw a glimpse of the café-man behind a tree-trunk in one of his drawings; he would have fitted into them somehow. Some footsteps away from the café-man, alienated women wanders through forests and meet creatures and animals. The humans never seem to meet one another. Wolves, apropos the debate between urban life and country-life. Horses, as taken from the idol-pages of a teenagers horse-magazine. Birds, hares and bats. Ragnar Persson mixes time and places and creates dreamlike wanderings. Atmosphere of fanzines, death metal and hard rock – in the forest, from which the Swedish people just wandered out of a generation ago. We just believe we are city-people, but we still mentally hit the tree-trunks while walking the streets.

The drawings are hung above the elevator, close to the evacuation door, between help-desks, a stage and the outdoor room the square “Plattan” offers. The exhibition is as made for this place, the content, the hanging, the idea.

Women with black kohl-pencil-lines round their eyes stare somewhere on the side of you, over your shoulder. You want to catch a glimpse of exchange, eye-contact, but they are not there to help you. They are obvious and lost at the same time. Civilization?

The exhibition by Ragnar Persson throws me back to the time when Kulturhuset was my safe haven. One could always listen to LP:s, browse the library or an exhibition, look at people and behave as if it was your living-room, well almost. Different social groups, subcultures and suburbia meet. Diversity as in no other place in Stockholm? Anyone was and is welcome. A man with paper-napkins under his feet for instance.

Girls on the beach with parasols, nude women or crashing planes?

A nude woman or a plane crashing is the best cover for the magazine Artforum when they want to sell single copies, according to the writer, art historian and sociologist Sarah Thornton who met the editors when making research for her book “Seven days in the art world.”

Two students from the School of economics in Gothenburg made a survey for their paper “The prize of art”, before the crisis on the art market. Olle Eckerbom and Magnus Sjöqvist wanted to know the mechanism behind the price of an art work. In an interview with them and the art gallery Åmells in Stockholm they came to a conclusion and a suggestion to artists who want to make money: paint young girls on the beach, with parasols! Don’t paint too many of the girls though, because then the price will fall.

Here we go. The motifs are ser for the market. Girls, girls, by men men,

Sarah Thornton is like the young boy in the fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor's New Clothes, who asks the question which normally seems too obvious and people rarely dare to ask. Why does the emperor not have any clothes on?

Sarah Thornton let us readers follow her meetings with the people who work on the art magazine Artforum - the editors, the critics and the advertisement-department.  We walk along with Sarah Thornton on the Venice Biennale area. Follow the tensions in an auction house Christie's. Meet the artist Takashi Murakami and the industry around him. Take part of a very special Crit Session at California Institute of the Arts. Mingle with the VIP on the Art Basel art fair and get an insight in the process of the Turner prize. We get insight into the art institutional life.

This art world is alive and kicking, and we get to experience the different parts of creating and forming The Art Life. All described as it if it happened during seven days. It is like a feverish strange dream. Hey, is there anything else but art?

“W-o-r-l-d”, what’s that, when you can be first in line to buy the hottest art work or have your gallery advertisement on the right page in The Magazine?

After reading the book all at once, you want to get out. I long to read about ART. Not the art-world. I try to think about what art is really about for me, what makes me work with art? It is about the art itself, the new horizons it opens, the people you meet - not about money, not about Prada-shoes neither fancy-living. I close my eyes and recall some stunning sublime art works.

It was truly fantastic. What a journey. Engaged participants. Inspiration. Intellect. Joy.

Like an art performance in itself, one participant said.

Space and time was spirited away.

40 partners from Poland, Germany, Russia, Lithuania and Sweden. We will soon meet in our joint seminar on the ferry, symbolic on the sea, where there are no physical or mental borderlines. A lot to prepare, a lot to share with all partners - to inspire, to transpire and have an interesting journey.

I will spend one day on the ferry to get ready before the first participants will get onboard in Gdynia and the morning after the rest will embark the ferry in Karlskrona. After this we will have one day together, starting up and ending with a gathering for the press and media. The Russian curator and artists Dmitry Bulatov, the Polish artists Mateusz Pek and Swedish curator Martin Schibli will also share thoughts, films and pictures about digital art, art and technology, bio-art and public art. Now Art Line is on Russian television!

Swedish contemporary art is presented in a large scale in by Moderna Museet every fourth year. Modernautställningen 2010, The Moderna Exhibition 2010, caused a lot of debate in Sweden. The edition shows 54 artists. 28 women and 26 men. The exhibition is accused of being too dry, academic and non-provoking. I found a lot of works with sublime, intimate and intrinsic power, not so grandiose in expression, but nevertheless thought-provoking. It takes courage to let the exhibition be so introvert and unobtrusive in parts. There are some great works. At the same time the totality of the exhibition makes you wonder why it is so very quiet in here when the world outside is burning in civil wars, terrorism, natural disasters and death in a never-ending news feed.

Some of the works have been seen earlier in art galleries in other parts of Sweden, which is not a big deal, since few people take their time to travel to exhibitions outside Stockholm.

In the magnificent installation by Kajsa Dahlberg stories are told, re-told and re-interpreted. Kajsa Dahlberg borrowed every available copy of Virginia Woolf’s classic “A room of one’s own” from libraries all over Sweden. (Published 1929, the Swedish version 1958). She took care of the underlining and comments by readers from the fifties and onwards by copying and transcribing all the writings into a new version. “A room of one’s own. One Thousand Libraries” is the title of her installation where she shares her artists’ book with us. We can read personal notes and preferences on what’s important for the anonymous writers, sometimes incomprehensible for anybody else than the writer, but still open up for other interpretations from several decades.

More stories are heard in the film installation “Sound Machine” by Esther Shalev-Gerz. Memories of a specific sound. Memories of the textile workers in Norrköping, from a factory which do not exist today. The mothers who worked there - and their daughters. Two women at a time, side by side, and face to face with us, share their history. Do the two generations of women remember the repetitive sound of the machines in the factory? Their daughters were still unborn when the factory was up running, waiting in their mothers’ wombs.

There is silence.

We can’t hear the machines.

Only the memory is heard.

To take part of the long horseback-trip through Sweden can be done over and over again. The film-installation “My country (Somewhere in Sweden)” by Ann-Sofi Sidén is a versatile, slow-motion story, describing the winding countryside. It is already a classic film-installation - but feels like a melancholic song.

You can climb up on the small Gibraltar-mountain made by Goldin + Senneby. Am I the monkey on top and being looked upon by other visitors, or have I shrunk to be a figure in a model railway landscape?  Am I suddenly a part of the installation? I read from their book “Looking for Headless”, which is a part of their semi-fiction story about a mysterious off-shore company and a secret society. Dr. Angus Cameron from Leicester's University at the Geography Department is their spokesperson since they never appear in the spotlights themselves.

2010 Cameron held a speech about the author Georges Bataille at London Zoo, where the cliff of Gibraltar stands model for the monkey-mountain. Bataille wrote about various subjects, for instance philosophy, and some texts were published under pseudonym. He founded a society called more or less “Headless” talking about his interest in human sacrifice. Sounds complicated? Do you have to know the entire story? What if you don’t want to spend hours to read the book sitting on the mountain? Then, think of how the work opens up for new stories, plots and fantasies of your own.

Was the speech a decoy declamation?

Disturbance?

Disappearance.

Dissolving.

To be continued…

“Arena” is an installation by Leif Holmstrand. He has arranged chairs with fabric seats to stand in two opposite straight lines, in order.

The table is missing.

Something is growing out of them.

Parts of clothes.

Textile outgrowths.

Interior design is transforming.

People and their furniture is becoming one.

People have disappeared, only their style is left.

Is the yarn connecting something? Does it draw the furniture closer to one another or create chaos?

Bringing objects to life?

All things will survive us.

The installation is accompanied by the text”But voices” and a performance.

The furniture is waiting for something to happen.

The stage is set.

How to upholster a chair with life?

There is more. Christine Ödlund and Leif Elggren share a special room…and…

For the next edition I have a wish-list and a dream. It would be great if the artists will be given time (and money) to produce brand new works.

The very first day of the year.

Lots of work drilling, cutting and sawing through the thick ice.

A hot sauna steams.

Quick plunges into the sea.

I  loose breath.

It’s more than 80 degrees Celsius difference between the sauna and the water.

Afterwards, energy and warmth.

Ready for a new year!

Came to think of one of my favourite video works by the Estonian artists Jaan Toomik, Father and Son (1998).  He is skating naked on the sea towards us, circles around us and finally disappears far away like it didn’t happen.  Like a poetic revelation, but also about endurance.

His skating is accompanied by his young son singing a hymn in a clear and frail voice.

A few minutes which feels like forever.

Soon, I’ll be meeting all partners in Art Line on the same Baltic Sea. Countries in a distance embracing the cold sea.