Nachts wachten wir, tags schliefen wir, immer abwechselnd.
So now there is a little bit of symbolic hope, but lots of work ahead as we are not out of the muck and mire.
My wonderful talented ex-student from Malmö Art Akademy in Malmö Sweden - Maria Norrman is a young artist on the rise. She sent me this little note about her upcoming exploits:
Here's info on the upcoming group show, the Malmö tribute exhibition Fucking Boring!
I will be showing a video of my drag character Millennium Starperforming MFF-Hymnen - the anthem of the local soccer team, at Lorensborg shopping center in Malmö.
I will also show a wall image of Millennium Star at Lorensborg, 4.15 x 2.25 m/163 x 88 inches (enclosed in this mail)
Fucking Boring
Participants:
Körner & Moreau
Maria Norrman
Bruno Weibelt
Ella Tillema
Runo Lagomarsino
Monika Larsen Dennis
Ditte Ejlerskov
Beck & Jung
Gallery 21, Malmö
http://www.galleri21.com/g21/Opening 14 November, last day is 13 December, 2020.
Opening hours: Thursday 15-18/3-6pm , Friday-Sunday 12-16/Noon-4 pm
A text by artist Peter Johansson, curator of the exhibition.
In the late 90's, early 2000, I talked with my friend the art writer Patrik Moreau about the art scene in Malmö, Sweden. We had lived in Stockholm both of us and were about to move to Malmö. It was such a difference. Not only did we get away from the stressful competition-oriented art world in Stockholm, but artistically there was a big difference in attitude and gestures in Malmö.
We actually started planning for an exhibition about these experiences.
But time went by and life came in the way.
However, in fact it was for the better because I got time to really see more of the artists, their working methods and of course the city which influences the art. A kind of historical debt.
In a small town with an art scene dominated by its Art Academy, the trends of the place are often spread to other artists like a ripple effect. For better or worse. Whether one wants to or not, certain main actors become decisive for the opportunities of art students and artists. This also goes for Malmö.
But the approach to these games of power was different than in Stockholm. Here there was the Scanian-Malmö approach, the saying "Auh vaudau?" - meaning something in the lines of a laid back “Eh, what (ever)”, which I liked. Many artists made stripped, one might call it new minimalist work of art. Something uncomplicated in action, material and idea and preferably with an ironic or humorous touch directed at the art itself, or perhaps made with a feminist twist. Well, they reused minimalism but they added a lot of the Malmö-spirit to this.
Like Denmark, minimalism came to Scania late, only in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s. From the American 50s / 60s minimalism and its continued history, something new was simply pushed forward. We do not need, I believe, to immerse ourselves in formal or semantic reduction, art-historical facts or clarifications, this is a completely personal interpretation and the important thing here is which kind of art suddenly emerged.
Already in the late 1970s and early 80s I visited Malmö a lot. It was the punk movement that drew me to DAD's dancehall and KB, which was then out in Erikslust, as well as Olympen and later Mejeriet in Lund, the neighbour town.
Back then it was rebellious music, newspaper and book publishing, political activism and house occupations which occupied my time, art came to me much later.
Malmö was a heavy working-class city but I felt at home.
In Malmö of today you’ll find an extremely rich part versus the very poor part in the east. Here you find the terrible opposition between Jews and Palestinian and Muslim groups, gang culture, between urban development and old Malmö, and between high culture and economically difficult-to-run clubs like Plan B and activism. Malmö is certainly not Stockholm or Copenhagen, because it is a smaller city, so the distances between these opposites are not too long.
The heavy compact worker-Malmö was also in its time something different than the rest of Sweden.
Early labor immigration and the Kockums shipyard crane that dominated, especially the city towards both the countryside and Stockholm.
The closures and the depression of the 80s, the desire for revenge in the 90s and then the new construction with on opposite poles, the Social Democrat Ilmar Reepalu and the construction contractor Percy Nilsson, who despite all the differences, met in the making of the new Malmö.
The artists I have chosen for the exhibition are all parts of this sprawling memory image of Malmö which I call Fucking Boring. It is actually a tribute to Malmö.
Monika Larsen Dennis works with sculpture, photography and video. She was born and raised in Malmö but educated in Iceland and the Stockholm Academy of the Arts. She has lived and worked in Stockholm, New York and Malmö, among other places. She actually lived for a time in the famous building Turning Torso in Malmö, the house which by both the general public and the government became a symbol of the new Malmö during the early 2000s. Monika is a generational friend of mine. Her stripped-down small objects, but foremost her work "The Kiss", 2004 is for me the reason why she is in this exhibition.
The Kiss is a work for its time period. From Auguste Rodin's well-known sculpture from the 19th century, Monika has removed the kissing couple to make room for the viewer to take a seat in the work. When you do it, you get a physical feeling of the limitation in how close we can get to each other. With a simple shape and a purity in the choice of material, Monika examines this thing called love.
Körner & Moreau are Kristian Körner and Robert Moreau, both of them worked as artists on their own in the 90s and early 2000s. Robert was actually born, partly raised and studied in Malmö.
They meet 15 years ago when Kristian moved to Malmö and have worked in close collaboration for almost five years, they’ve been deeply focused on the slide frame's strange allure.
This year, 2020, it is finally time to collect all the works of art, films, installations and thoughts they have prepared for exhibitions. First out was Aura Krognoshuset in Lund in October, and now I have had the great honor of receiving the baton.
It is something enormously imaginative which happens when you remove the image content from the slide frames. From the emptiness that arises, Körner & Moreau then builds both meticulous and time-consuming very strict works that receive dizzying references to art history, housing projects and family albums. Their work also consists of photography and video films as well as installations, where there is room for both dystopia and comedy. That's why the artist duo is in Fucking Boring.
Runo Lagomarsino was not born in Malmö, but Lund, the neighbouring town. Born in 1977, he is also a generation younger than me and the above mentioned persons, but he is also a bit more clever in his artistic work. I see him as a child of the refugees from southern South America which came to Malmö and Lund in the mid - 70s. His parents emigrated from Argentina.
For me, Runo is extremely important for this exhibition. He weaves new from old photographs, historical events, focuses on things most people would think of as rubbish, uninteresting or just completely misses, from this come fantastic poetic or even political works of art. He tells the story of things. He becomes to me like a bridge between the old and often forgotten history and the present.
The artwork which has meant the most to me is probably the film with Runo and his father as they approach a colossal monument and literally throw eggs at the grotesque sculpture and its history. ("More Delicate than the Historians" are the Map-makers " Colors ”video, 2012-13).
Bruno Wiebelt builds such grotesque sculptures that Runo throws eggs at, albeit in miniature.
These small masterpieces are not only the image of Malmö from the workers' era, but could be miniatures of communist monuments from Azerbaijan or Armenia, standing like bunkes in the middle of a border conflict, just to make a contemporary example. They are violent, brute, absurd and just simply wonderfully outstanding. I think Bruno spends as much time and care on his brutalist objects as our artist duo Körner & Moreau, but although the difference in form and appearance is miles wide, I still think the meaning is the same. Bruno makes the pictures which Körner & Moreau removed from the frames of their slides.
Ella Tillema is also of the younger generation, fortunately. Because if you take a quick glance, it may seem that Ella is a painter from the political 70s. But she is more a product of its time.
Ella is an activist and makes art as resistance to injustice, to struggle and change. Her paintings and objects are hopeful fantasies, sometimes mundane, sometimes magnificently visionary, but always stripped, daring picture stories. She builds optimistic castles made of air. Pictures of mountaineers walking towards their destiny, of the Malmö resident Wiehe, who sung about the Titanic, and self-portraits in the middle of everyday chores, all of this mixed together, yet clear and positive.
This is art against business and new degrading labor reforms, against excessive consumption, against capitalism, against the prevailing system and racism. Together with her whole family for feminism and justice.
Maria Norrman is always highly topical. She’s made one of the contemporary video works which inspire me the most: "The Regiment" (video, 2015), where five Danish history enthusiasts (reenactors) choose to dress in Nazi uniforms and play roles as if they were these people. They recreate various historical military battles and events. The strange and fantastic thing is how Maria also acts and goes in and out of the film and the story and manages to bring out both horrible and human aspects of the persons and history.
In this exhibition, Maria shows documentation of her drag character "Millennium Star,” a performance at the typically Malmö-dull Lorensborg, a shopping center, the heart of Malmö's joy of shopping. In this mundane space, Millennium sings in tribute to Malmö FF - the soccer team native to Lorensborg, and it all makes for an aesthetic chaos in my brain.
Ditte Ejlerskov also repeats events, more contemporary ones and more actively manipulates and dissects everything from stereotypes, contempt for women to the beauty industry and the world's need for space. Often with material taken from the digital world and always with the feminist angle. Stripped repetitions clarify what she sees and wants to point out.
Ditte has, just like Maria Norrman and Ella Tillema studied at Malmö Art Academy.
One of the works which really influenced me is her collaboration with EvaMarie Lindahl, "About: The Blank Pages" (2014), where they show with clear precision the skewed view on art made by women in the art world through the book publisher Taschen's art publications, where 95 books are published, 5 about female artists. Their artistic reaction woke me up.
Beck & Jung is an artist duo and the historical reference that this exhibition needs. Beck & Jung was the name of two Scanian artists: Holger Bäckström (born in Lund, 1939 - 1997) and Bo Ljungberg (born in Lund, 1939 - 2007), and they were computer art pioneers. They used mainframes as they were called at the time, as early as 1966 at Lund University's data center. They worked with line printers and later pen plotters and needle printers. Here their first works of art came to life. In the 70's, the inkjet printers came and they switched to using color.
They made concrete pictures with geometric patterns and their art was shown all over the world. Their last exhibition was called "Computer Art" and was shown 1997 in Germany.
The work I have personally fallen completely in love with and which has followed me from the 80s, is the aluminum or brass sculpture / ashtray "Ultima" which is available in countless versions (70s). This genius work is still a guiding light for me and is the artist duo's bestseller with an edition exceeding a million.
