John Kelly “The Garden Shed” (2011) at the Göteborg International Art Biennale

The Göteborg International Art Biennale gathers inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pandemonium is the realm Lucifer creates for himself and his fellow fallen angels when he is cast out from heaven, a realm where chaos rules and ideas and actions differ from those in heaven. The subtitle is Art in a time of creativity fever and with that, the biennale wishes to make comment on the creativity which surrounds us in today's society, and furthermore, make room for an alternative, chaotic, different artistic creativity.

Whether they have succeeded or not with this ambitious theme, there is one artwork which has gotten my attention, and the artist behind it is John Kelly, originally from Australia, currently living in Ireland.

The Garden Shed is a huge model of Tate Modern, the museum for contemporary art located in London, UK.

The scale, the rusty exterior and the associations to my own visits to the Tate caught my interest. But there's more to it, you are able to walk inside this structure.

Inside, you are met by sound, light and sculptural models. One is room number six on level three in Tate Modern, exact down to the floorboards. And when you stand beside it, marvelling at the detail, you notice a letter on display on one of the walls; a letter sent from N. M Cummins to Duke Wellington in 1846, where An Gorta Mor, the Great Famine is described. The suffering the Irish people had to endure is juxtaposed to Henry Tate, who at the same time in England made his fortune from selling fruit and vegetables.

In total, there are five pieces inside this amazing Garden Shed, among them a fantasy pavilion for Ireland to place at the Venice Biennale, the Pandemonium Poems, made from the exact words used in N.M Cummins letter and John Kelly's mum and dad at Tate Modern.

If there is one word to describe Kelly's art, I would think multilayered is quite accurate. There is so much to discover, so many stories, and so much thought behind his work. It's fascinating, and very inspiring.

You can find out more at:
http://www.johnkellyartist.com/index.php?pageID=5&PHPSESSID=9844b769ecf8dabf0a91946cd1454343

/J

EXHIBITIONS IN EUROPE; ONGOING AND SOME TO LOOK FORWARD TO

The Guggenheim museum in Berlin shows Agathe Snows' All access world until the 30th of March.

Miró at Tate Modern in London. Tate will show some of the key works from the colourful surrealist painter from Catalonia. Exhibition starts the 14th of April.

The Venice Biennale 2011. The 54th biennale will open in June.

BERLIN, ICH LIEBE

Between 28^th of February and the 2^nd of March I went to Berlin and one of my days there was spent visiting the Bauhaus museum, located on Klingelhöferstrasse 14 D.

I had planned on visiting the museum and somehow I happened to come across it while exploring Charlottenburg, a huge part of the Berlin city centre. The sun was out, it was a crisp morning with bright sunlight shining upon the rainbow coloured pillars and the white minimalistic building. The museum lies just beside the river and huge willow trees grow around it. A sign in primary colours lead the way towards the forward thinking designers who begun with Walter Gropius.

Inside, you get to see the many expressions of the Bauhaus group, the textile, the architecture, the furniture, and the ceramics. It is quite a small museum, but there is still a rich exhibition to experience. I wanted every chair I saw. The design is so anonymous, and yet so special. The industrial steel frames, the hand woven fabric, the cool greys and the striking oranges. Because it is so simple and so ingenious you can picture the designs in your own home, you want it in your own home, and that makes it good design.

Some of the lead words of Bauhaus, like original, innovative, form and function, really comes through in their work. Mies van der Rohe and Vassily Kandinsky were ever-present in the rest of my Berlin tour. The exquisite national gallery with art from 1900 to 1945 is a giant, the scale of the building makes one feel infinitely small. The Kulturforum offers several museums, apart from those in the centre around Friedrichstrasse.

The general impression of Berlin is vastness, to walk the huge streets and stare in wonder at the towering buildings. New and old together, there always seems to be construction somewhere, to expand the already giant city.

I also visited Tascheles, which is an artist collective, on Oranienburgerstrasse 54-56a in a building that is close to crumbling. All around the older quarters have been destroyed, leaving a hollow for Tascheles to claim, with their barracks and tents and amazing metal sculptures. Inside, you climb the graffiti covered stairs to find some closed doors, but occasionally one is open, and you’re invited in to an artist studio. There’s much to discover, and the artists are keen to talk about their work.

HEADS UP.

A butoh dance show premiered last night and will run to this Sunday 6th March.
FRAUKE / VOID @ Atalante, Gothenburg Sweden. 

ANNA LING / OCEANS OF AIR.

Oceaner av luft (Oceans of Air) by Anna Ling is currently on display between
25th Feb - 20th March in Gallery 54, Gothenburg Sweden.

I went to see the exhibitions during it's opening night. I went solo to openings that night, and I think I quite like it that way. You obviously meet people either from before or make new acquaintances. But it also makes you and let you actually look at the art because you have to engage in something if not chatting up some old or new faces. My tip to you, it's like the cinema, it can be quite liberating to go by yourself if you are comfortable with it. Openings are more an event of the sort to meet people you haven't seen for a long time or new people you come across along the way in queue for a glass of free wine. In other words, not so much art really. I sometimes like to go to openings as a social event but sometimes I want it to be quiet and just go to exhibitions during it's display in non rush hours so to speak. I always go twice if I go on openings, to get a second impression by the art itself rather than the event.

Oceans of Air, the title which I've translated literally from Swedish. I was captivated immediately by the title which has a poetic ring to it. The ocean is a metafor for the sky this time, ocean in plural Oceans of Air. Referring to when you look out the window up in an airplane and what you can see at times are actually Oceans of Air. This is what you see in Ling's drawings. A scheme with lines that accentuates excerpts of this big ocean. She's not making outlines of fluffy clouds obviously but instead reduced vertical lines that just gets you a hint of the shape the air is forming in the sky. Brilliantly executed, eleven drawings in pencil and ink are on display. They are very quiet and minimalistic to their aesthetics with white frames on white walls. The clouds varies in shades of grey, with a hint of beige in it if I'm not mistaken.

The first two words I scribbled down when I walked away from the venue was silence and isolating. In a venue full of people, chatting drinking and drinking wine, this is what the drawings gave me silence and isolation. It felt just like when you are either up in the air or in a tunnel on a train suddenly your ears are locked and you can't hear properly, that's how I experienced the drawings, but without the uncomfortable lock that sometimes hurts of course. They were open, quiet and changing. Transience as clouds are, Ling captures that quite accurately. They are suggested to be a metafor for the transiency in everyday life, forever changing and hard to get a hold of. And what Anna Ling does is just that, trying to get a hold of something that's impossible to grasp.

Image taken from Gallery 54. 

STREET VIEW / THIS IMAGE IS NO MORE.

Last April 2010, STREET VIEW  happened on Kungsportsavenyn in Gothenburg, Sweden.

It was a group exhibition produced by MAP with various site specific art work.

This Image is no more by Good TV
Solution by Gustav Hellberg
After Hours - During Hours by Mats Hjelm
That's Life by Maria Lindberg
I'm Thinking About Myself - Poseidon by Marianne Lindberg de Geer
Together by Hans Rosenström

We were a part of what you can call a performance work, This Image Is No More, by GOOD TV who are LouLou Cherinet, Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberana and Michele Masucci. They gathered over ten storytellers who'd sit in a specific place whom the visitors had to seek up themselves using directions and maps. And then upon demand the storytellers would show them this image who no longer existed. Either it's been erased, manipulated, destroyed or it never really existed physically. The image could be of a real object, memories, a dream, a vision or just a fantasy conjured in collaboration between the artists and the storyteller. Each storyteller had their own image, and each time they showed their image, by telling, every visitor would see their own image of the image in their imagination. It would never be the same, The storytellers would tell the same image but in different ways since it changes everytime depending on how you tell it. The core would always be the same, but you never tell a story exactly the same ever. And depending on the visitors own associations and relation to the image they'd been shown they'd have different reactions and thoughts. I shows my image around a hundred times to about hundred and thirty or so visitors.

What was so great about this art work/performance was really how it questions what art really is and the different ways of perceiving art. And as for the visitors who saw these images in their heads, the relation between an image and the viewer was also questioned. A meeting, several meetings, took place.

The role as a storyteller was very fascinating, because you faced the image in various ways. In it, with it, behind it but also in front of it when the viewer made reflections upon it. With their own reflection a new image took place. So each time you revealed the image to a viewer the original image it felt like you gave a piece of the original away and slightly changed the image.

Isn't it how it's like with physical artefacts while they are exhibited, hung on the wall or placed on a pedestal, it's exposed to interpretation and open perception by the viewer. You make the piece your own by the way you perceive it. Even if its an actual physical object or a image that is no more, whatever you see it's yours but nobody else's image. This is what I saw in This Image Is No More. 

LOULOU CHERINET / TESTAMENTS BETRAYED.

Testaments Betrayed 22 January - 27 February 2011 at Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg Sweden.

I met Loulou Cherinet last April during Street View, a group exhibition produced by MAP, she was one of the trio GoodTV which showed the work This Image Is No More along with Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberana and Michele Masucci. I was engaged in their work by being a volunteer at the whole exhibition but I also ended up as one of their storytellers. (I'll explain another time) I had no previous knowledge about them, nor did I grasp what kind of art they were doing when flying solo. But I was sure of that it wouldn't be boring.

Testaments Betrayed is what she calls the exhibition, mixed with a new work and older works. She works in moving visuals, video art, and engages the viewers in race, gender, ethnicity and identity issues. I know I know, when I first read that, I thought, oh that's new... and wasn't to keen on that simple description which is inserted in most of the contemporary art today. But I had to go to the exhibition to see for myself, and most of all I wanted to meet her again. (social networking is crucial in the art world.) In the rooms and in the cathedral of Röda Sten I found video art that moved me. Many times, here comes a confession, video art has been much of a monotonous bore, but not this. She's not just making arty videos and playing hard to get, well she does that too, but it's not entirely abstract video art. She adresses the issues directly and far more visual than I'd like them to.

For instance in one of her works, Bleeding Men, she has several dark colored men lying in a what I assume is a bathroom floor, a lot like the showers in gymhalls, anyway, they are lying there all dressed in white tunics, and then you see them cutting themselves in the arm. It was like it was one person and you just saw them in different angles at once, and you see them bleeding and in the end they stand up walk away and all there's left is pools of blood on the floor. I actually saw it in reverse order, it was even more powerful. I walked in on the video, going in loops, at the end of it, so I saw the pools first and then the beginning with them lying there. That's what so unpredictable with video art, you can catch fragments of it if you don't watch the whole or start from the beginning or get another experience from it that intended.

Another video work is White Women. Where several black men sitting around a table eating and telling stories of their first encounters with white women. The hierarchy, patriarchy and and race-difference is discussed without disguise. They talk and laugh freely about these white women as their conquers, encounters and broken loves and so on. They all wear the same red striped shirt and the camera is placed in the middle rotating as one of them is telling their own story. You're not so sure if it's OK to laugh at the stories they are telling, you are not sure if to identify with them or with the women they are talking about or as another authority to morally judge them. Because many of the stories are quite discriminating, both in race and in gender and at times offensive but also hilarious.

One with dual screens which I did not catch the name of was screening two different landscapes but same motifs. One of Sweden and one of another what we might call third world country. Where the difference between two women in respectively country is shopping for groceries and another screen of the accomodation, graffiti on the walls, the sea, the trees. What can be found in one country can be found in another, but there's still a significant difference. But also very much like the other.

There were several works which I have not covered here and those I did were only fragments. My poor description of this exhibition does not do it justice and I have even left out one of the great parts, the building itself. Do see the exhibition in person, it's well worth it.