ARTLAND

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.