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.