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Kom och se hur en film blir till på Rooseum
Se hur scenografin byggs upp, hur filmen framställs och ta del av de första klippen som vi, så småningom, visar som stora projektioner.
Under fem veckor ska Rooseum förvandlas till en filmstudio. Mark Lewis projekt The Near and Far Real består av en utställning som samtidigt förvandlar museet till en produktionsplats.
Projektet The Near and Far Real ger publiken tillgång till de arbetsprocesser som ligger bakom konstens tillblivelse i ett försök utvidga publikens deltagande i det estetiska arbetet.

Bland filmfotografer är det en etablerad kunskap att man genom att kombinera en zoomning med en kameraåkning i motsatt rikting kan skapa en förskjutande sammandragning av bilddjupet både bakom och framför motivet, samtidigt som motivet självt fixeras på stället. Denna tekniska förflyttning, ibland refererad till som push-pull, blev populär med Hitchcock. Mark Lewis kommer, oaktat den klichémässiga användningen av push-pull, att i The Near and Far Real undersöka hur denna teknik kan ses som ett verktyg för skapande av en anamorfisk filmeffekt.Som en fortsättning av Lewis undersökning av de illustrativa aspekterna av film, ger push- pull honom möjligheten att utvidga och utforska målerigenrerna, med särskild hänvisning till hur vardagslivet framställs.
I det här projektet hämtar Lewis sin inspiration från porträttkonsten och utforskar de filmiska möjligheterna av denna genre.

Andra filmer av Mark Lewis som kommer att visas samtidigt som den nya filmen produceras är:
Churchyard Row, 2003, 35mm, kopierad till DVD, 4 minuter
Jay's Garden, Malibu, 2002, 35mm, kopierad till DVD, 4 minuter
Centrale, 1999, 35mm, kopierad till DVD, 4 minuter
Smithfield, 2000, 35mm, kopierad till DVD, 4 minuter

Wrap Party
4 juni kl 19 –24 hälsas alla välkomna till Rooseum för att se klippen från filmen, äta, dricka och umgås.
Dj hela kvällen lång.

2-årsjubileum
Minimal elektronica, glitch och microhouse.

Live:
Ronnie Sundin (Fällt, Häpna)
Bauri (Deltidseksapism)
Martin Jarl+Johan Futmeijer (C.Bonarelli) (konvexkonkav, mitek)
Mathias Kristersson (Komplott)
Figurera (Komplott)
No Source One (Komplott)
Inaktiv
Dj DNFN
Dj Mikael Westberg
Dj Smyglyssna
FUMCA Cooperation (ljudinstallation)

Entré 60 kr

Medverkande konstnärer: Bas Jan Ader (NL), Sture Johannesson (S), Silke Otto-Knapp (D), Mathilde Rosier (F), Wilhelm Sasnal (PL), Lily van der Stokker (NL), Frances Stark (US)

Creeping Revolution 2 är fortsättningen på en serie experimentella utställningar och projektmodeller som Rooseum har prövat under de senaste två åren. Creeping Revolution 2 är en grupputställning med konstnärer vars verk främst är visuella och som försöker påverka omvärlden genom personlig upplysning och individuella erfarenheter, ofta genom att spegla de närmaste vännerna och familjen snarare än samhället som helhet. På sätt och vis kan detta ses som en möjlighet att begrunda den andra sidan av de socialt engagerade, dokumentära verk som har visats på Rooseum under de senaste sex månaderna. Att detta skulle vara en återgång till en reaktionär ståndpunkt är dock en inställning som måste avfärdas. I stället är det ett sätt att hävda att den sociala och personliga förändringen (till och med revolutionen) är lika betydelsefulla mål för samtidskonsten. Att definiera verken i utställningen som revolutionära är att framhålla konstens inneboende potential för förändring, minst lika mycket handlar den om att förändra människors tankesätt som att utföra aktioner på gatan. Med tillägget ”creeping” ger man ett mått på hastigheten och precisionen, såväl som introducerar utställningens långsamt förändrande metodik.

Creeping Revolution 2 har sin förebild i en utställning organiserad av Foksal Gallery i Warszawa 2000. I den utställningen arbetade ett antal konstnärer med väggarna och golvet i en mindre variant av den vita kuben. Ytterligare konstnärer bjöds in under en period om en månad för att göra tillägg till de verk som redan fanns i galleriet. Creeping Revolution 2 har ett liknande tillvägagångssätt: Konstnärer bjuds in till öppningen och därefter kommer tillägg eller förändringar att göras under hela utställningsperioden. Tanken är att uppmuntra besökarna att återvända och göra jämföranden från veckan till vecka, ge dem möjlighet att se de olika stadierna efterhand som utställningen byggs upp. Vi hoppas även uppmuntra konstnärerna att betrakta sina verk i relation till varandra och göra det möjligt för dem att reagera på element i varandras arbeten. Slutligen kommer denna form av utställning att flytta konstinstitutionens gängse gränser, samt dess strävan efter beständighet och bevarande, och därmed fortsätta det nya Rooseums institutionella experimenterande.

Om den nuvarande trenden av dokumentär och analytisk konst ska lyckas, behövs det intelligent och intressant kritik ur olika vinklar. Om vi, någon gång i framtiden, vill undvika enkla bakslag tillbaka till stum expressionism bör vi tänka över hur man balanserar analys med fantasi, det politiska med det personliga, samt förändring i samhället med en ökad revolutionär medvetenhet. Genom att skapa en diskussion om verk som är estetiska snarare än öppet politiskt engagerade, försöker Creeping Revolution 2 höja nivån på debatten och bidra till förståelsen för att också skönhet, vänskap och det personliga kan också vara revolutionärt.

Participating artists: Bas Jan Ader (NL), Sture Johannesson (S), Silke Otto-Knapp (D), Mathilde Rosier (F), Wilhelm Sasnal (PL), Lily van der Stokker (NL), Frances Stark (US)

Creeping Revolution 2 continues a series of experimental exhibition and project models that Rooseum has tested over the past 2 years. Creeping Revolution 2 is a group exhibition of artists whose work is primarily visual and seeks to affect the world through personal illuminationand individual experience, often reflecting on immediate friends and familyrather than society as a whole. In some ways it can be seen as an opportunity to consider the flipside of the socially engaged documentary work that has been shown in Rooseum over the past six months. However, any idea that this is a return to a reactionary position must be dismissed. It is a case of maintaining both social and personal change (even revolution) as equally significant aims for contemporary art. To define the work in the exhibition as revolutionary is to suggest that the way art makes change possible is at least as much in the head as it effects actions on the street. To modify it with the term creeping is to provide a measure of the speed and accuracy of its effect, as well as introducing the slowly changing methodology of the exhibition itself.

Creeping Revolution 2 takes its lead from an exhibition organised by Foksal Gallery, Warsaw in 2000. In that exhibition a number of artists worked on the walls and floor of the small white cube space, being invited over a period of one month to add to works already in the gallery. Creeping Revolution 2 takes a similar approach, inviting artists for the opening and then adding or changing work over the period of the show. The idea is to encourage viewers to return and compare from one stage to the next, allowing them to see different stages as the exhibition is built up. Also we hope to encourage the artists to see their work in connection with each other and possibly respond to elements in another’s work. Finally, this way of making a show will push the usual boundaries of the institution with its desire for stasis and preservation and continue the institutional experiment of the new Rooseum.

If the current vogue for documentary and analytical art is to thrive it needs intelligent, interesting critique from other angles. If, at some point in the future, we are to avoid a simplistic swing back towards dumb expressionism, we should think about how to balance analysis with imagination, the political with the personal, change in society with expanding revolutionary consciousness. Creeping Revolution 2 by starting a discussion about work that is aesthetically rather than overtly politically engaged, seeks to raise that debate and contribute to an understanding that beauty, friendship and the personal can be revolutionary too.

Medverkande: Avanto–Helsinki Media Festival, Copenhagen Free University, Factory of Found Clothes, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Involved, Make it Happen, Valie Export Society, Primitive/art bureau OPEN, Uglycut e

Filmprogram: Kristine Briede/Locomotive International, Marko Raat, The So-Called Records,
Pia Rönicke, Mika Taanila, Dmitry Vilensky

Baltic Babel är ett storskaligt samarbetsprojekt om konst och ett nytt Östersjösamhälle, något som nu tycks vara under utveckling. Nio oberoende och innovativa organisationer, grupper eller aktiviteter, bjuds in från Östersjöstäder inom avrinningsområdena Köpenhamn, Stockholm, Helsingfors, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, S:t Petersburg och Warszawa. Dessa organisationer är upptagna av konst och kultur, fast de skulle också kunna vara involverade i andra oberoende politiska eller sociala aktiviteter.

Denna typ av konstnärsgrupper har kommit att få en nyckelfunktion vad gäller konstproduktion. De har utvecklat alternativa strategier för att få fram en annorlunda metod för institutioner att ifrågasätta förhållandet mellan konst och samhälle, samt visa på konstens position i förhållande till globalism. Den enorma politiska förändring som ägt rum i Baltikum under de senaste tolv åren har haft inverkan på konsten och dess möjligheter. Unga konstnärer vill stifta oberoende utrymmen för att kunna fortsätta existera på de platser de känner sig bundna till, utan att behöva ge sig av till förmodade centrum eller låta sig domineras av marknaden och centrala institutioner. Denna utveckling är en mycket vacker metafor över förhandingen mellan globaliserad ekonomisk makt och all typ av ansträngning för att frambringa alternativa lösningar och lokala genmälen.

Oberoende gallerier, konstnärsgrupper, alternativa filmfestivaler, kontorsbaserade storstadsprojekt och forskningsorganisationer kommer att presenteras i en samling olikartade arkitektoniska strukturer i den stora hallen på Rooseum. Var och en har själv bestämt innehållet i strukturen och stundtals inviterat andra samarbetspartners. Projekten som skall visas inkluderar dokumentärfilm, en musikmarknad, en butik, en bar, en tidningsvägg, en dia- och videopresentation, såväl som kurerade utställningar och performance. Idén till presentationen tar sin utgångspunkt i Gwangjubiennalen för 2002, där grupper från hela Asien och Europa var inbjudna. I egenskap av ett mindre upptagningsområde, är det vår förhoppning att Baltic Babel kommer att skapa en liknande energifylld stämning och fånga något av den specifika atmosfär varje enskild stad besitter.

Idén är att lansera modeller för olika typer av oberoende aktioner för sammanförandet av konst och samhälle i Öresundsregionen. Att erbjuda publiken regional visuell kultur, sett genom de människors ögon som är verksamma i de berörda områdena. Kanske kan vi föreställa oss att den känslomässiga karta som malmöbon bär med sig kan förändras och att den geografiska realiteten att Warszawa och Tallinn har en närmre belägenhet än Paris och London kan begrundas.

Utställningen kommer också att undersöka beskaffenheten hos interregionalpolitik och starta upp utvecklandet av ett seriöst regionalt nätverk. Det skall ses som ett tillfälle att, i ljuset av dess visuella konst, förnya synen på vår region. Att se vad och hur olikheter i regionen genererar kreativitet åt dess komplexitet och stödjer eller utmanar möjligheten för en ny union. Utställningen kommer även att bli en fängslande, omedelbar resa till specifika städer i regionen, där det visuella används som ingång till vitt skilda lokala kulturer. I mikrobiografen har vi sammanställt ett urval av filmer och konstvideor av individuella konstnärer från regionen, som fokuserar på olika städers socialhistoria och urbana miljö.

Baltic Babel kommer dessutom att ifrågasätta meningen med kulturell globalisering och föreslå internationalisering – utbyte mellan likvärdiga parter – som en mer tilltalande och relevant modell. Regionen tillgodoses med ett färdigkonstruerat nätverk för eventuell framtida vidareutveckling, såväl som att olika lokala organisationer för första gången länkas samman. Med hänsyn till en rad nyligen uppkomna politiska och kulturella trender i regionen, har dess kulturella institutioner ett ansvar att främja de grundläggande värdena med kulturell och språklig skillnad för alla samhällen. Endast med en utgångspunkt av ömsesidig respekt, kan vi förvänta oss att globaliseringen kan beskriva någonting annat än exploaterande ekonomiska system.

Den brokiga sammanställningen av organisationer kommer att inkludera olika modeller av praktik, där samtliga medverkande har sin utgångspunkt i det visuella i vid mening, vilket kommer att tillföra energi i egenskap av olikhet och innehåll till hela utställningen.

För besökaren till Baltic Babel, hoppas vi att erfarenheten av utställningen kommer att uppmuntra till omvärdering av hur vi utifrån Öresundsregionen ser på det internationella. Det forntida Babels torn byggdes för att nå himlen, men resulterade i den uppenbara förbannelsen av människans språkliga mångfald. Detta Baltic Babel lägger fram ett mer horisontellt förslag. Det är ett sätt att hylla skillnaderna genom att försöka nå en annan nivå för ömsesidig förståelse – där ambitionen inte är att nå himlen, utan att mötas.

Factory of Found Clothes

Baltic Babel stöds av Fonden Kulturbro och ingår i Kulturbro 2002.

För ytterligare information kontakta Rooseum på 040-12 17 16 eller [email protected].

Participants: Avanto–Helsinki Media Festival, Copenhagen Free University, Factory of Found Clothes, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Involved, Make it Happen, Valie Export Society, Primitive/art bureau OPEN, Uglycute

Film program: Kristine Briede/Locomotive International, Marko Raat, The So-Called Records,
Pia Rönicke, Mika Taanila, Dmitry Vilensky

Baltic Babel is a large-scale group project about art and the new Baltic society that might now be in development. 9 independent, innovative organisations, groups or activities have been invited from the watershed Baltic cities of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, St Petersburg and Warsaw. These organisations are concerned with art and culture though they could also be involved in other independent political, or social activities.

Such groups of artists have emerged as the key force in art making as artists have developed alternative strategies to negotiate a different basis for making institutions, questioning the relationship between art and society and reflecting the position of art in relation to globalism. The huge political changes that have occurred around the Baltic in the past 12 years have effected art and its possibilities. Young artists want to instigate independent alternative spaces so that they can continue to exist in the places to which they are committed without leaving for the presumed centres or being dominated by the market and central institutions. This development is a very beautiful metaphor for the power of negotiation between globalised economic power and all kinds of effort to provide alternative solutions and local responses.

Independent galleries, artists’ groups, alternative film festivals, office based urban projects and research organisations will be shown in a series of different architectural structures in the main Rooseum hall. They have each determined the content of the structure themselves, at times inviting other collaborators or artists with whom they have already worked. These projects will vary from documentary films, a music market, a shop, a bar, a magazine wall, slide and video presentations as well as curated exhibitions and performances. The idea for the presentation takes its lead from the design of the 2002 Gwangju Biennale in Korea, where groups from all over Asia and Europe were invited. For a smaller geographic area, we hope Baltic Babel will create the same sense of energy and capture something of the specific atmosphere of each city.
The idea is to bring to the Öresund region models for independent action connecting art and society and to offer our audiences a chance to view regional visual culture through the eyes of people based in those locations. We might imagine that the emotional ‘map in the head’ that Malmö citizens carry with them could ultimately shift, reflecting a geographic reality that Warsaw or Tallinn are closer to us than Paris or London.

The exhibition will also explore the nature of interregional politics and begin the development of a serious network across the region. It should be an invitation to re-imagine our region in the light of its visual culture and to see what and how the differences across the region add creativity to its complexity and support or challenge the possibility of a new Baltic 'union'. It will also be a compellingly instant trip to specific cities in the region, using the visual as a point of entry into widely different local cultures. In the microcinema downstairs, we have also made a selection of films and art videos made by individual artists from the region that focus on social history and the urban environment in different cities.

Baltic Babel will question the meaning of cultural globalism and suggest interchange – exchange between equal partners – as a more compelling and relevant model. It will provide a ready-made network for the region to build on in the future as well as link various local organisations together for the first time. Given some current political and cultural trends in our region, its cultural institutions have a responsibility to promote the fundamental value of cultural and linguistic difference for all societies. Only on the basis of mutual respect can we expect globalisation to describe anything other than an exploitative economic system.

The mix of organisations include various models of practice. They will all be grounded in visual cultural practice in its broadest sense and will bring the energy of difference and discourse to the whole exhibition.

For the visitors to Baltic Babel, we hope that the experience of the exhibition will encourage a reassessment of our international outlook from the Öresund region. The ancient Tower of Babel was built to reach heaven and resulted in the apparent curse of human linguistic diversity. This Baltic Babel is a more horizontal proposition. It is a way of celebrating differences while trying to reach another level of mutual understanding - ambitious not to reach heaven but to meet each other.

Baltic Babel is part of Kulturbro 2002, and supported by ’ The Kulturbro foundation’.

Open: Wednesday – Friday 2pm – 8pm, Saturday – Sunday 12 – 6pm

For further information, please contact Rooseum, +46 40 121716, [email protected]

Rooseum is delighted to host the first major showing in Scandinavia of the work of João Penalva in an exhibition together with Matts Leiderstam, one of the most accomplished of the current generation of Swedish artists.

This exhibition will be the first of a series of two-person shows at Rooseum in which the artists are jointly involved with Rooseum in developing the project. This model gives the viewer an unique opportunity not only to see a substantial body of work by two fascinating individuals, but also to observe a dialogue unfolding between two artists and two groups of work. Their works are generally layered narratives relating to a cultural landscape, the space between the seen and the understood and emotional relationships. This is expressed through photography, video and text works, often brought together in large-scale installations.

João Penalva's works often take a portrait of a person or a single filmed shot of a landscape as the starting point of a long interwoven narrative. The works are based on text, verbal communication, translations and various transcriptions and are usually presented as complex installations or films. Works in the exhibition by João Penalva will include two installations based on texts and translations entitled Addressing the Weeds in Hiroshima from 1999 and LM 44/EB 61 from 1995. In the upper gallery we will show a slide and sound installation, Character and Player from 1998. In the Microcinema two video projections, Kitsune (The Fox Spirit) from 2001 and 336 PEK (336 Rivers) from 1998 will be presented, both of them expanding the relationship between image and fiction. 336 PEK (336 Rivers), for example, presents a fixed image of a distorted, yellow-colored park, in which nothing happens. A deep, dragging Siberian voice is telling a string of stories in Russian, subtitled in English. The artist has said about this piece that it "…was conceived as a film that could provoke four separate, simultaneous perceptions: of what you see; of what you hear; of what you read; of what you visualize. Each one has its own time."

Matts Leiderstam uses the history of painting as a key reference to discuss cultural clichés, prejudice and patterns of habitual thinking. By using the spectator's curiosity and attentive reception, he wants us to question our own received ideas and ways of looking. The works are usually presented as installations often including photographs or slide projections as well as paintings. In the main hall he will present a new project titled The Artist is at the Niagara Falls, projecting a huge image of the Niagara falls and a copy of a painting of the famous waterfalls. There will also be four large colour photographs entitled The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, referencing a painting by Gustave Courbet from 1854, and a series of photographs of Vesuviu´s eruption made after a painting from 1771 by Jaques-AntoineVolaire.

In the upper gallery Leiderstam will present a piece that will invite the viewer to look upon older portrait paintings with new eyes. He suggests that by looking closer at certain paintings from Western art history, such as ideal landscapes, portraits or genre pictures from the Victorian era, one will find more or less hidden erotic themes. It is within the parameters of this erotic gaze that Leiderstam operates. The issue of truth or falsity has no relevance to his work; he simply proposes a parallel look at art history as we know it.

As one of the major Scandinavian institutions for contemporary art, Rooseum prides itself on balancing the impulse to be first in reflecting new art developments with the desire to organise substantial exhibitions by important individual artists. With this exhibition, we have constructed a collaborative approach to exhibition making while creating a framework within which the artists can reveal their own qualities. As such, Leiderstam and Penalva continue the experimental approach to Rooseum programming begun in 2001.

Ola Billgren till minne
12-27 January 2002

To herald the new year, Rooseum will present a retrospective exhibition in memory of the Malmö painter Ola Billgren that left us in October 2001. We are indebted to all our lenders for helping bring about this exhibition so quickly.

As an artist who chose to base himself in Malmö, Billgren created the conditions under which it is possible to be an international artist living and working here. His example is particularily important for the new direction of the Rooseum, as we try to combine international excellence with a commitment to developing a new art scene in the city and region. Our ambition is to help artists here become visible internationally and Billgren's life notably demonstrated that reality.

Ola Billgren held a respected and well-known position within Swedish contemporary art throughout his career. The Rooseum exhibition presents paintings from the 1960's until 2001 showing his many changes of mood and style. In total, a selection of approximately fifty works has been made from private and public collections in Skåne. Many of the works are usually on display only in the private homes of collectors or the artist's family and friends and the show will therefore be an opportunity to see works that are rarely or never shown in public.

Ola Billgren was born in 1940 in Copenhagen. Both his parents were artists and they moved from Denmark to the Scanian countryside shortly after. At fourteen Ola Billgren made his debut at Tomelilla Konsthall. Consistently throughout the years he stayed loyal to the potentialities of painting but within that tradition explored many different expressive possibilities. At the Rooseum exhibition you will be able to see early abstract still life paintings from the 1960's leading to the photo-realist works that continued until the mid 1970's. This period of photographic depiction received a good response from critics and general audience and when he shifted into the more abstract and romantic painting that dominated the 1980's there were some regretful voices. Today that disappointment has turned into enthusiasm for his exceptional treatment of the expressive language of painting. The short period between these two periods was marked by the influence of the French Impressionist painter, Pierre Bonnard, and examples of this brief diversion can also be seen in the exhibition. In the 1990's Billgren returned to the figurative, but now in symbiosis with the romantic paintings, thereby closing the circle of his own production.

In 1992 Ola Billgren had his extensive retrospective at Rooseum that later toured to Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Rooseum is honoured to once again have the possibility to present a retrospective collection of works by this great Malmö and European artist.

3 November - 16 December
Nothing in the Main Hall

The3 november – 16 December 2001 Nothing exhibition presents the idea of nothing as a substantial artistic subject. In the midst of a flurry of publishing and debates about the mathematical history of zero, artists also have a history of exploring visual, playful and philosophical approaches to the void, invisibility, and absence.

This ambitious and exciting exhibition brings together over 36 international art works from the 1960’s to the present day. The exhibition looks at how artists have been and still are, occupied with negotiating nothingness and the void.

A major concern for artists in the 1960’s and 1970’s was questioning the idea of what we see before us. They examined the part that material qualities play in supplying evidence of an artwork that may purely exist in the imagination. Artists Robert Barry and Douglas Heubler made work that expanded the notion of sculptural space. Heubler’s ‘site sculptures’ identified a location as an artwork, which may or may not be apparent to the passer by. Barry released specific quantities of radioactive gas into the air, a performance sculpture that literally loses itself in the environment.

More recently artists have tested and parodied these works and ideas. Keith Tyson’s telepathic invitation to collaborate - resulting in a blank canvas and Pierre Bismuth’s blue wall a slightly different colour blue that you can’t see. These artists make playful homage to Robert Barry’s telepathic piece, made in 1969, and Yves Klien’s patented colour International Klein Blue. Tacita Dean’s sound work Trying to find the Spiral Jetty is a recent recording of her search for Robert Smithson’s land sculpture in Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA, 1970, now submerged.

Creative processes are often about making something out of nothing or nothing out of something. Ceal Floyer’s Garbage Bag, 1996, a bin liner placed in the corner of the gallery and Angela de la Cruz’s Nothing (Blue),1998 a scrumpled up canvas, contrast relative values of the material and the idea.

Matthew Crawley investigates ideas of nothing. His work A Film of me hiding in the bushes, 1996, which is just that, offers a playful incite into the faith of invisibility. By constructing a column in the gallery Gaia Alessi explores architectural invisibility and the value and description of empty space. In this way ‘nothing’ is a frame of reference and only exists if you are not looking for it. The phrase ‘there’s nothing there’ is a valu judgement.

Participating artists: Gaia Alessi, Art & Language, Fiona Banner, Robert Barry, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Bismuth, David Connearn, Geoff Cox, Matthew Crawley, Martin Creed, Angela de la Cruz, Tacita Dean, Barry Flannagan, Ceal Floyer, Peter Fraser, Margarita Gluzberg, Gilbert & George, Liam Gillick, Kristján Gudmundsson, Graham Gussin, Hans Haake, Nancy Holt, Douglas Huebler, Dean Hughes, Alex Ingram, Yves Klein, Gerhard Lang, Jeremy Millar, Tatsuo Miyajima, Jonathan Monk, Gabriel Orozco, Victoria de Rijke, Hayley Skipper, Robert Smithson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Slaven Tolj, Keith Tyson, Sophie Weeks, Lawrence Weiner, Andrew Weir, Ian Wilson, Keith Wilson and Carey Young.

Curators for the exhibition are Ele Carpenter and Graham Gussin. Producer is Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, where the exhibition was shown 12 april - 3 juni 2001. The exhibition tour also includes Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Litauen,
22 juni - 19 augusti 2001.

The exhibition catalogue includes texts and images by 80 artists and writers. Published in collaboration with NGCA and August Media.

Johan Svensson lives in Malmö and graduated from the Art Academy here in 2000. Since then, he has shown a series of exhibitions in Scandinavia and was awarded a three month studio grant at Suomenlinna in Finland. His show at the Rooseum continues the policy of encouraging emerging artists to produce new, ambitious work for our project room.

Johan Svensson works with sculptures, drawings and objects to tell narratives that are often allegorical or surrealist. His work can reference famous and infamous personalities, places, signs and events taken from history and contemporary debates. In his presentations the subjects are liberated from their original situation to create a world where new combinations emerge.

In the Rooseum Project Room, an enormous sugar landscape is scattered over the floor, covered with a swarm of nasty, deformed insects. Nailed to their hard little bodies are well known trademarks: McDonalds, VW, Marlboro, Nike, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, Calvin Klein and Shell. The work becomes a creepy, slightly sickening vision of a version of our consumer paradise, parodied by an overabundance of sweetness.

The inhuman strategies and ruthless marketing of the trademark companies can be seen as the dark side of our welfare state, something we come across every day of our lives. Recently a growing resistance to consumerism is making itself heard. For example, the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein talks about the dry fact that it is the trademark rather than the product that consumers pay for, a fact that would be a nightmare for these companies and marketing industry if it were seriously understood.

The understanding that peoples first role in society is as citizens rather than consumers is perhaps less evident now than ever, yet the intention of Svensson’s work is less to point this out than to ask us to think about the consequences of handing power over to the global brands so easily.

The Rooseum is happy to announce the award of the Fredrik Roos Konstnärsfond 2001 and a small exhibition of the winner, Petra Jensen.

The Konstnärsfond regularly awards a grant to a young, promising artist in Sweden and this year the grant has been awarded to Petra Jensen. She was chosen for the personal and independent vision she developed during her education at Kungliga Konsthögskolan in Stockholm. In connection with the award Petra Jensen will show the installation försvinn, i väg, får se in Rooseum’s Future archive.

Petra Jensen focuses primarly on painting as well as working in parallel on drawings, photography and objects in plastic and wood. With the two-dimensional surface as a point of departure, all these techniques are brought to play in försvinn, i väg, får se. Without a clear hierarchy, each element in the work unfolds in the three dimensions of the space, creating a unique visual world. Entering this world you travel into a fantastic, abstract universe with fragments from well-known figures, forms and signs. It is a meeting between a psychological inner world and an outer reality that can often be difficult to distinguish. As a viewer you cannot help feeling that something is about to happen.

Our new exhibitions Michel Auder and KOSMOS continue the process of dividing the Rooseum into units in which different things can happen. The Michel Auder exhibition inaugurates the new microcinema and KOSMOS will see a new use for one of the workspaces. In the future we will sometimes organize two exhibitions at the same time, one in the main hall and one upstairs in the project space, as well as giving access to the Future Archive, microcinema and the two work spaces for local artists - projects that will develop significantly in the months to come.

Michel Auder began as a filmmaker in Paris during the 1960s, having been influenced by the poet Arthur Rimbaud and the innovative ideas of Jean-Luc Godard. In 1969 he left for New York and joined Andy Warhol and the Chelsea Hotel circle. Around this time he purchased the first commercially available video camera, and has since shot thousands of hours of footage on an almost continuous basis.

For Michel Auder, the camera functions as a personal means of expression, documenting the people, places and events in his immediate surroundings. The inspiration for his work is drawn from everyday life and media,TV in particular, and occasionally he has made direct recordings of telephone conversations. This raw material is put together to form intimate portraits and personal reflections on real life. The overall impression of his work presents an image of a stunningly open and unprejudiced viewer subject, depicting the life of which he is an intimate part.

The Rooseum exhibition with Michel Auder will take place in the main hall and the microcinema and present video, film and photography from over thirty years of his production. It is the first major manifestation of his work and the exhibition is also important as a reference for younger video artists who have emerged in the 1990s. We will present a large variety of documentaries, biographies, travelogues and feature films where the political, the sensual, everyday realism and the poetic are woven into one another.

Rooseums new project room will host the exhibition KOSMOS, presenting works and projects by Sofie Thorsen, Olof Olsson, Karl Stampes, Dejan Antonijevic and Gardar Eide Einarsson. The five artists are connected to Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, either through residence or by attending the art academy and finishing their education there in the last couple of years.

The KOSMOS exhibition is intended to give a partial snapshot of the emerging generation of Scandinavian artists based outside Malmö. As artists who are still attending or have left the academy recently they are in a position characterised by a drive and energy to experiment and attempts to reformulate or reinvent arts value. Their special circumstances can also be seen as expressing a certain sensibility or mode of operation, understood as a way of working towards something, which may seem personal or dynamically investigative, without the distance that follows longer familiarity.

It is this situation that frames the exhibition, not as a direct theme but as a point of view from which one can experience the subjects and ideas of the artists. The works in the exhibition are diverse, both in terms of themes and formal qualities, though an interest in socio-political issues is prevalent. In particular the artists are interested in making visible the influence of an individuals surroundings in order to stimulate reflection and criticism. The media vary from drawings and photographs to installation works and sculptural objects.

KOSMOS is the first exhibition in a series of projects with younger artists that Rooseum plans to initiate in the next couple of years, locally as well as internationally.The title KOSMOS is composed of the three cities: Copenhagen, StockholM and OSlo. Using the geographical reference the exhibition invites us to think about the tendency to perceive Scandinavia as a universe with specific qualities. Several international exhibitions have dealt with Scandinavia and, even though the intentions have often been to present the individuality of the artists rather than a common identity, the geographic frame may create the sense of a somewhat introverted universe - a cosmos so to speak, as a well-ordered, definable whole. As far as that goes KOSMOS is no exception but the exhibition will also pose questions about the ways we identity ourselves within a given universe and how its particular conditions and circumstances influence our understanding.

What defines a 'community' and how are artists today discussing political action, solidarity and living together?
The exhibition Vi - Intentional Communities brings together work by 20 contemporary artists, historical documentation from the late 1970s and early 1980s and presentations by active groups in the Copenhagen/ Malmö region.

The term 'community' is open to many interpretations. It can imply a kind of exclusivity that easily slips into xenophobia or distrust of others outside the group. At the same time, community is one of only a handful of useful concepts that we can use to describe the collective in this period after socialism. The notion of an 'intentional community' might also seem contradictory, but it is in regular use today by different groups who seek to develop a way of life based on certain agreed principles. The rich period of experimentation around and after 1968 is a particular source of inspiration for this exhibition and has become a rich catalyst for a number of younger and more established artists who are examining the longer-term legacy of 1968 and its perceived failure through their own eyes. 'Intentional community' also questions the arbitrariness of our own local or national community and the ways we identify ourselves.

The exhibition includes a small amount of historical material from communes and seventies communities including the commune Friedrichshof in Austria. However, the main emphasis are on contemporary work modelling different ways of living as well as projects actively creating intentional communities today. The works explores various real and imaginary communities, proposing new collectives, creating private social worlds and documenting existing groups. The atmosphere of the show jumps between the optimism and hope of building a new world and the terror of imposing a single vision on the whole of humanity. The exhibition section includes film, photographs and sculptural installations by Pawel Althamer, Elisabeth Arkipoff, Johanna Billing, Phil Collins, Annika Eriksson, Jakob Kolding, Mike Nelson, Philippe Parreno, Arturas Raila, Sean Snyder, Jasmila Zbanich, Andrea Zittel & Joachim Hamou amongst others. Projects by make it happen and proto academy working with different communities in the city of Malmö will be initiated during the exhibition since Vi also is a way of looking at the possibility for our own local communities in this region. A programme of discussions with people from different communities, artists' groups, planning agencies and activist organisations in the region will therefore accompany the exhibition.

'Intentional communities' serves also to introduce the new activities of the Rooseum over the next five years. The programme will be the first co-ordinated integration of projects, exhibitions, studios, archive and micro-cinema that will comprise the new Rooseum structure. The exhibition is therefore an invitation to our audience to identify themselves as a community and become involved in the process of re-imagining the Rooseum, defining it as a place rooted in the region while reaching out to the world.
More theorically, it will instigate an over-all policy by practically testing Vito Acconci's pivotal statement from 1980: 'A gallery could be thought of as a community meeting-place, a place where a community could be formed and called to order'.

ROOSEUM PROVISORIUM
There's gonna be some trouble, a whole house will need rebuildning
(Morrissey, "Now My Heart is Full", Vauxhall and I, EMI Records 1994)
10 March - 1 April, 2001
Curators: Charles Esche and Åsa Nacking

Artists: Mark Bain, Will Bradley, Martin Creed, Liam Gillick.
10 March Mark Bain, Martin Creed, Liam Gillick
(Mark Bain performance)
19-30 March Will Bradley "All the Needles are on Red"
25 March Workrooms: Katya Sander, Superflex, Future Archive intro
31 March "All the Needles..." music event
2 April Liam Gillick, lecture at the Rooseum
While the reconstruction of the identity and purpose of the institution is underway, a series of events, proposals, architectural performances and music happenings took place in different spaces throughout the building. We aimed to sparkle new life in the old electricity hall.
The visitors could take part of the digital presentation of the suggested alterations of the building by Liam Gillick and was invited to interact with the installation of 12 000 balloons by Martin Creed downstairs. Mark Bain made the main hall sound like an instrument and made the whole building tremble in a documented performance. The remains of this performance, a wall turned over, laying on the floor, was then used by Will Bradley as a scene in his music project "All the needles are on red". The music project was an open recording studio for young and non established musicians for two weeks.
The two Workrooms opened in the upper gallery, and the first invited artists, Katya Sander and Superflex, where installed. In the basement the Future Archive opened, which was the start of this five year archive project.

Century of Innocence - the history of the white monochrome
16 September - 17 December, 2000
Curators: Bo Nilsson and Åsa Nacking

Artists: Absalon, William Anastasi, Torsten Andersson, Armando, Ola Billgren, Dove Bradshaw, Keith Coventry, Ad Dekkers, A K Dolven, Michael Elmgreen/Ingar Dragset, Lucio Fontana, Lesley Foxcroft, Raimund Girke, Robert Gober, Rune Hagberg, Mona Hatoum, Jan Henderikse, Shirazeh Houshiary, Einar Hylander, Callum Innes, Anders Kappel, Ellsworth Kelly, Clay Ketter, Yves Klein, Wolfgang Laib, Sonja Larsson, Bertrand Lavier, Sherrie Levine, Sol Lewitt, Kasimir Malevitj, Piero Manzoni, Jason Martin, Allan McCollum, Gerhard Merz, Marlow Moss, Per Mårtensson/Sirous Namazi, Ben Nicholson, Kehnet Nielsen, Henk Peeters, Robert Rauschenberg, Håkan Rehnberg, Robert Ryman, Karin Sander, Katya Sander, Jan Schoonhoven, Henryk Stazewsky, Rudolf Stingel, Jean Tinguely, Sophie Täuber-Arp, Günter Uecker, Franz West, Dan Wolgers, Herbert Zangs, Rémy Zaugg.

Century of Innocence is the Rooseum's project for Kulturbro 2000. The title indicated our ambition: to provide an overview of the development of art in the twentieth century; but not viewed from a traditional art-history perspective, with the stylistic schools of art history constantly succeeding one another. Instead the intention of the exhibition is to illuminate the history of art from a specific perspective - that of the white monochrome. Despite the restricted point of departure, Century of Innocence was a many-faceted, "different" picture of the century, from early modernism to the present day.

Our modern idea of the colour white has its roots in the nineteenth-century literary milieu where the white colour was associated with death and thus with evil forces. It was Kandinsky - the foremost colour theoretician of modernism- who recharged the colour white for the twentieth century, turning its negative power into something neutral that belongs with emptiness. However, the neutrality of whiteness was to be rejected by Kazimir Malevich, who in 1918 painted White on White - one of the most significant icons of the twentieth century. Malevich radicalized the whole idea of the white colour as something separate. He combined the white colour with an abstract formal idiom and thus a coordinated aesthetic unity arose. Thus Malevich stressed the fundamental opposition of modernism between spirit and matter, which has only reached total resolution in our own time. Malevich set up a contrast between the purity of art, as art that is "about art", and the function of art in the service of society. In so doing he set the agenda for the two most important issues of modernism.
Modern art possesses a high degree of self-awareness and an ideological critique of the internal parameters of the artistic world, but in the use of the white monochrome one finds something that can almost be characterized as a naive attitude that gives expression to a hope for an innocence in art. The white monochrome represents the dream of an art that is not based on a theoretical construct. It is this undercurrent of pure art in the great flood of modernism that has given the exhibition its title.

Catalogue: For the exhibition the Rooseum published a richly illustrated catalogue with an introductory essay, Thoughts on whiteness, by Anders Olsson. The catalogue also offers more specific texts on some of the central artistic oeuvres, written by Otto von Busch, Maud Färnström, Magnus Jensner, Carl-Johan Malmberg, Åsa Nacking, Bo Nilsson, Gertrud Sandqvist, Åsmund Thorkildsen and Henrik Wivel.

The Edstrand Foundation Art Prize 2000
17 June - 20 August, 2000
Curator: Magnus Jensner

Artists: Birgir Andrésson (Iceland, born 1955), Karin Granqvist (Sweden, born 1965), Charlotte Gyllenhammar (Sweden, born 1963), Hans Hamid Rasmussen (Norway, born 1963), Henrik Plenge Jakobsen (Denmark, born 1967), Brita af Klercker (Sweden, born 1906), Matts Leiderstam (Sweden, 1956), Rita Lundqvist (Sweden, born 1953), Maaria Wirkkala (Finland, born 1954) and Anders Österlin (Sweden, born 1929).

The Edstrand Foundation, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2000, awarded SEK 1,6 milllion distributed over five Nordic grants, the grants for artists active in Sweden, as well as two special anniversary grants (Brita af Klercker and Anders Österlin)
All the grants were represented in the exhibition by one or, in several cases, by a larger number of works. Painting had it´s special status in the exhibition, but it included video and installation as well.
A catalogue was produced in connection to the exhibition.



Matts Leiderstam		João Penalva