ARTLAND

- 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.