Rooseum-TEXTS ON THE ARTISTS

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Television, advertisements, and music videos have engendered narrative forms that lack causality. This naturally affects all types of film making, so that, today, the question of how to tell a story through film can give new and surprising answers. Eija-Liisa Ahtila examines new narrative forms in her films and installations; well-known forms merge and generate a whole new genre. The short film Me/We is constructed like an ad for washing detergent but the persons act as if they were in a family drama or documentary. The result is perplexing for the viewer, who is forced to reflect over the structure. Family is a frequent theme in her films, but the emphasis is on the individual and his or her relationship to family, sexuality, and other related issues. The film Grey may be seen as a dramatization of a news report, where apocalyptic undercurrents are combined with beautiful poetic images. In her latest work, Anne, Aki and God, five different candidates are auditioning for the role of Aki. God appears on a screen over Aki's bed, which is placed in the exhibition room, and gives him information about the drama's female character. Roles often shift in Ahtila's films, and the images run counter to common experience with narrative films: to a large extent, the viewer is responsible for creating the structure. The interplay between speech, sound, movement, and color combine in a collage-type form to give shape to her fascinating tales. "In the end, narratives are a matter of perspective," says Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila : Anne, Aki & God

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson employs various transitions in nature involving heat, cold, lightness, and darkness as sculptural elements in his installations. With the help of technological solutions, he recreates temporary phenomena found in nature, such as rainbows. His use of technology is purely functional, and the equipment is always clearly visible. But his constructions are never object oriented; rather, they pertain to the immaterial. There is a phenomenological aspect to many of his works, but the evident manner in which they are usually presented gives them a more melancholy and poetic atmosphere. Working in the tradition of early modernism, Eliasson demonstrates how different light conditions can alter perceptions. But it is the dematerialization of the art object of the 1960s and 1970s that has had the greatest influence on his art. He states that his works are neither critical nor political but are an attempt to convey to the viewer a positive feeling, a reverence before nature. During the months of the year that Eliasson lives on Iceland, he creates photographic series that can be seen as a subjective documentation of the landscape and its formations. They possess all of the elements of nature that comprise the props of his installations, that is, the familiar environment which he recreates in an entirely other context. At times, one senses that Olafur Eliasson succeeds with his art in surmounting our perceptions of the dualism between nature and culture.

Ólafur Eliasson: Broken Stone Series

Anette Harboe Flensburg

Our understanding of the world is dependent on language. And our vision provides an interpretation which is both reflexively and socio-culturally conditioned. When someone describes a painting, it is through language that their visual experience is conveyed. People use certain visual codes whenever faced with visual depictions. Furthermore, we read images according to certain conventions, and vision is always conditioned by a series of different factors. For example, history painting is constructed around a narrative. In still-life painting, though, the scale of values on which the narrative is based is set aside. With Anette Harboe Flensburg's series of six paintings, which can be described as still lifes of a sort, she reintroduces the narrative element. When the paintings are accompanied by texts, a complex story slowly emerges, which in this series stresses the family, a subject that Flensburg has investigated in several paintings over the past few years. These paintings are derived from photographs, and in the transition from the photo to the canvas, Flensburg deals with a central issue for the medium: painting is done not only for the eyes but, also, with the eyes. Is there a vision capable of opening the world to another vision than the strictly theoretical? In her work, Anette Harboe Flensburg has succeeded in creating a world that lies between the documenting image and a deeply personal vision, and, in doing so, reveals the painterís trained eye as different degrees of perception.

Anette Harboe Flensburg: In Every Family there is Someone

Ann Lislegaard

What sort of experiences are we looking for in art today? When everyday events are increasingly mediated, and so much in society is approaching an imaginary world, what do artists do? One strategy is to try and find new forms of presentation, to create concrete situations, genuine experiences that directly act on the body's senses. Using tactile material, light, and images, Ann Lislegaard creates such works, often with a well-articulated spatiality. Her works frequently generate a tension by straddling a world between concrete reality and the undetermined. She reveals that art today is often a process rather than a product, an active participation rather than a passive perception. One method for challenging the eyeís hegemony is to give the supposed neutral exhibition space a threatening feeling, to make it a place for emotional reactions. She succeeds in this goal in the work The Garden of Eden/The Need of Danger, a labyrinthine installation with sheer veils of cloth, fluorescent light, and a hypnotic voice, where the viewer is transported into a new physical and psychological environment. The video installation Nothing But Space contains two projections filmed with the help of a reflective foil developed by NASA. The familiar spatial structures we daily find ourselves in dissolve in these projections into an unpleasant psychedelic footage. In a suggestive manner, Ann Lislegaard intensifies our experiences of reality and takes us to the edges of our own perceptions.

Ann Lislegaard: Nothing but Space

Mikael Lundberg

Recurrence or repetition has long been Mikael Lundberg's method of working. This, combined with a special feel for the various imprints left by time, is what distinguishes his work. He calls our attention to the fact that there are many different ways of measuring time, to read the imprints of time in the world. In his studio, he shows me some little boxes containing various objects, things that have become signs of the past. When these are put to new use by the artist they suddenly acquire a new place in history from where to testify to another time - almost like an old photograph. When he documents the gradual disintegration of matter in his works, it is as if he sought to make time visible. Is it time itself he is seeking to portray? Entropy - a term borrowed from thermodynamics - which Lundberg spoke of in conjunction with his earlier works runs counter to the common notion of a mechanistic view of the world. Instead, it describes a succession of irrevocable states, where every state is also unique.

Mikael Lundberg's work Mummy encapsulates the imprints of time instead of documenting and detailing their effect on a given object, at the same time as the black, crackled shell and the number of objects are completely in line with his earlier method. He does not reveal what lies buried deep inside the black objects, but in some cases we can almost guess. Has he managed to capture time, or has he simply painted over the portrait? The contents of the objects may be seen as a metaphor for time: the invisible presence, the only evidence of which is the effects of entropy.

Mikael Lundberg: Mummy

Lena Mattsson

Society is changed by small measures, remarked Lena Mattsson in an interview. It is with this aspiration that she approaches her performance and video installations, from the aggressively, sexually challenging, via a strong social engagement, to the subtly poetic. Initially a painter trained in a classic tradition, Mattsson still identifies with this profile, even in her video art, where she tries to weave together life and art. In recent years, Mattsson has received particular attention for highlighting and questioning injustices, deficiencies, and discord in society. In her art, she has problemized and shown, in a clear and provocative manner, how these societal developments affect certain people. Mattsson actively participates in several of these works, which are fraught with a strong identification with the affected persons as well as references to her own personal experiences.

Gender roles and identification problems comprise another theme in Mattsson's art, including how our understanding of gender roles evolve via images we encounter, and expectations and social situations we experience on a daily basis. The video installation The Secret Room shows, in two different projections, a young girl playing with dolls. Her games with Barbie and Ken relate to family, various role playing, idols, and appearances, all dominant and important themes in a young person's life. In one of the film sequences, the course of events lead to a dramatic conclusion.

Lena Mattsson: The secret Room

Monika Nyström

Polarities have played a prominent role in Monika Nyström's work light and dark, interior and exterior, visible and invisible. And with simple material, she creates refined expressions. She has used light and mirrors to make things visible, but, above all, she makes the viewers conscious of their own vision and its conditions, and sometimes even lack of vision. Light can both illuminate and conceal, depending on one's relationship to the source. In Nyström's works with thread, which have fluorescent and phosphorous properties that convey the images, the viewer is physically in the picture's space, directly witnessing the transformation phenomenon that occurs when the ultraviolet light shines on the threads and then quickly disappears to give way to a new image. The images convey to the observer a sense of physically different contexts. Nyström's new pictures on display at Rooseum contain similarities with painting. But rather than working to make visible the material of paint, she depicts the immateriality of light. With a shutter speed of a few minutes, Nyström is able to capture the protraction of a movement in space over an extended time interval. Compared with a snapshot, which captures only a moment, the open eye registers a transformation. We see the object that moved in front of the camera. The minimalistic impulse of her work partly remains within the plurality of the images; but it also gives way to a sort of chance lyricism, paint tracks that are both opaque and transparent. The artist calls the works "slow" photos. Pictures that possess immense visual beauty and concentration.

Monika Nyström: Untitled

Annika von Hausswolff

Since the middle ages, skeletons have been the image for death. When we bare our teeth, we expose the only visible portion of our skeleton. In the work As Death Prolongs the Laughter Annika von Hausswolff pulls back her lips to show us her teeth, and, thus, not only does she present an image of death but her own skull her own death is revealed. Humans are the only creatures who are conscious of their own mortality, or, at least, the only ones who depict it and who use every means possible to overcome it. The series Back to Nature can be understood as images of a violent crime: women being raped, killed, and abandoned. At the same time, they are contemporary depictions of death, such as encountered in films and the evening news. Death is an obvious theme in Annika von Hausswolff's work, but it is death as a representation or symbol for something else. She is leading an existentialist battle in her images. Through death, man is returned to nature and loses his unique consciousness about his inevitable fate. Von Hausswolff uses the image of death in an endeavor to reach a primordial point, a ground zero of consciousness. An endeavor to reach a point where man may act more freely. In her more recent works, which are exhibited here, nature still occupies a central position. All the works were taken in the California night, and they are full of humor, seriousness, and playfulness. There is a curiosity, a willingness to seek out odd motifs, paired with the same careful sensitivity to the image that is found in the earlier series.

Annika von Hausswolff: State of Emergency with Blue Jeans

Kennet Williamsson

In his search for the original form of the vessel, Kennet Williamsson experiments with both organically bulging forms and familiar classical clay shapes from a number of different time periods and cultures. He has worked both with unfired clay and with technically advanced glazes. The vessel, the container and its function, plays an important part in his artistic work as does the poetic and magical aspect of these forms. He has also been inspired by Tao Te Ching and by emptiness as the "utility" of the vessel. In a letter to me, Kennet writes: "Working with your hands leads to intuitive insights rather than intellectual ones. My sense of clay as a primary material, its erotic and sensuous character obviously play an important part in fashioning the shapes and makes the borderline between idea and action fluid." The large, unglazed clay vessels are not only beautiful, sensuous shapes, but they also bear witness to the passage of time. The shapes are not thrown, they are carefully constructed from rolled, soft strings of clay. Their gradual disintegration as the clay dries testify to a slow process, likened by the artist to the withering of flowers.

In his organic giant pots, Kennet Williamsson manages to preserve the elegant lines of classical shapes at the same time as the monumental vessels convey a deep sensualism combined with a mystical, almost sublime, quality.

Kennet Williamsson: Käril

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