Category: Sun Times News

It’s impossible to not find yourself slightly overwhelmed when 18 participants from Konstskolan Munka presents their work together in the exhibition Allt är obligatoriskt at Skånes Konstförening.

Exhibition
Participants:
Käbi Apelgren Backlöf, Johanna Bjuremo, Mia Ekman, Fanny Fahrman, Vilma Fredriksson, Klara Hedin, Yrsa Hedström, Gustav Kathirgamer, Nina Johansson, Jinling Li, Fouad Mahammadie, Ralph Noack, Sara Poppler Carredano, Anna Svedberg, Catja Tonberg, Saga von Stedingk, Jonna Wäreby och Rasmus Östlund.
Venue: Skånes konstförening, Malmö
3-12 May 2019

In a small room I find the installation I badrummet by Vilma Fredriksson. The interior is created from soft and reshapeable foam instead of hard ceramics. Arms and head of the character living in that space are shaped in hardened clay instead of inconstant muscles and flesh. The face is fixated in a tired expression. Still it performs so vividly and alive when it is moved through a hand underneath its carefully knitted cute sweater. I’m in love with those shoes by the way. I recognise myself in my bathroom, starring at my face in the mirror.

Psychoanalytic theory “the mirror stage” invented by Jacques Lacan describes how we in a specific moment in our development as humans realise ourselves as objects. A moment where we are starting to grasp the complicated connection between the self and others, evoking feelings of my body to only be existing in relation to someone perceiving me. Perhaps this is one reason to why a bathroom without a mirror feels like a frightening place to me.

Perhaps it is inescapable being watched. Is it then possible being an artist without some sort of exposition? In this exhibition 18 artists are exposed and today I’m happy it’s obligatory.

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.

Silent communication between hunters in the woods. We look, we nod, we use our equipment in this loaded moment when we are invited to join the slightly interactive performance Jaktlaget.

Performance
Jaktlaget with and by: Olof Runsten, Patrik Patsy Lassbo, Milja 
Rossi and Annika Tosti.

Text & directing: Olof Runsten Photographer 
Cinematographer: Milja Rossi 
Scenography & costume: Annika Tosti
Light, sound and music: Patrik Patsy 
Lassbo 

Venue: Inkonst, Malmö
12-13 Appril 2019

Two camouflaged hunters are giving us advice through dark modified voices: Don’t speak to them, take care of each other and only photos with flash are allowed, but they are really, really allowed.

I instantly take a photo of them, with flash turned on. Sharp knifes stabbing a hole in a big plastic bag, I expect some dead animal. But, what’s in there is my outfit for this evening (or morning) ritual.

In the forest coffee is served. Through the familiar taste I feel a bit more relaxed. 

Jaktlaget presents a silent communication between hunters in the woods. Not mainly because you are there to hunt, but because this is the way we communicate in this game. We look, nod to each other, use our equipment and sit close together. We are waiting close to each other. Being fysicaly quite close is enough for our thrill. This is what’s it’s all about, this slow but yet so power loaded moment of expectation is the most intense moment in the hunting practice.

Moving slowly. Sharp knifes. Hidden faces. The darkness. The forest. Theres this erotic touch to the situation, especially when the magazine Sexy Mountain is introduced. The paper is thrown on the floor in the dirty woods for us to read in the light beams of a car.

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.

In that yellow light the cables on the floor are carefully mounted. This is a place to listen, this is a place to dance, this is a place to talk.

Conversation
Who are you? Are you a name and a space? a conversation with Tawanda Appiah and Simona Dumitriu.

Venue: Skånes Konstförening

Who are you? Are you a name and a space? We are gathered around a vinyl record player in the middle of the room. The yellow light in the room covers our stories with a historic shimmer.

Tawanda Appiah and Simona Dumitriu invites us to take part of the curatorial conversation around the exhibition “The appearance and disappearance of futures and pasts”. Listening, talking and playing music.

Sound is brought up as an instant and powerful tool to express identity and culture that can be replayed in future new environments. A politic tool against colonisation. A social tool to reunite. A historic recordable movement sounding from the pasts in to the futures. Appearing and disappearing, some sounds are in some times and places impossible to find.

Individual perspectives are shared by Simona Dumitriu and Tawanda Appiah around personal and collective life stories connected to and constructed through music. Music as something joyful, music against oppression, music as a gathering.

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.

A vibrant and glowing, not always just funny comic-style, green silicone towel walkthrough when Christopher Füllemann presents Useless Romance – (It’s All About Seduction and Death) at Galleri CC in Malmö. 

Art exhibition
Useless Romance – (It’s All About Seduction and Death) with Christopher Füllemann at Galleri CC.

Curator: Sofia Wickman
Venue: Galleri CC
Exhibition date: February 26 – March 26 2019

Walking down to the Galleri CC dark room I’m a bit nervous this time. It could be anything down there.

This fleshy pink limb.

Hanging there.

Or actually it’s crawling around. I can feel its strength. It takes some muscles to keep in that position for a while.

The light is glowing so vibrant I immediately fall down in fantasies.

Walking through the wormy silicone curtains All My Boyfriends Dicks (2018) in to another room they get stuck in my face. I want to try this walkthrough a couple of times.

I notice a dropped-skin-shaped-flesh-textured… Swing!

The black chains melts in to my own old rubber ball tempting feelings. Someone entering the slaughter room now. Is it me or them who’s gonna get slayed in that swing I find myself fantasise about for a while.

I walk through All My Boyfriends Dicks (2018) again. Who gave me permission to touch them?

Touch them again and again.

They are soft.

If I just touch them a little they move by themselves for a while in unpredicted movements.

Later, putting my green silicone towel over the handrails down to the pool my comic-style round simplified feet stand straddle-legged ready to jump in while theres a huge amount of organic resin blood forming another sort of pool on the floor. Did I finally also get my period or was I hurt in some way? 

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.

You’ve never seen the lonely me at all is a search of queer life stories in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s intimate and personal both as separate works and as a collective gathering of knowledge of life- and survivalstyles.

Art exhibition
You’ve never seen the lonely me at all with Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Anna Daučíková, Mi Kafchin, Mária Takács, Mima Simić and Marta Šušak, Ines Lukač, Teri Szűcs and Maja Pan, Valentina Iancu.

Curator: Simona Dumitriu
Venue: Skånes Konstförening.
Exhibition date: February 1 – March 3 2019

I get to choose if I want to take my shoes of or use plastic covers. What would my shoes look like in plastic covers I wonder. And of course my answer is always to be barefoot when I get the opportunity. I’m entering the video work Silent by Pauline Boudry and Renare Lorentz with performer Aérea Negrot

In the white textile covered room I’m embraced with powerful will to express a beautiful resistance I couldn’t feel in the Malmö streets earlier today. Sitting here in my not-that-glamorous winter jacket I feel under-dressed. Longing for sequins in the summer streets. Soft white fabric under my feet, I want to roll around in there. Those benches are made not to be seated on I think.

After the long intro in the video, I love long silent intros, when she starts singing and the beat comes on I’m already seated on the floor. I release my jacket. Can I stay for the whole day? It’s soft refreshing and warm. Remember how I yesterday thought about how it was a long time since i experienced art that I really enjoyed. I’m alone in here. And this experience is for me. This is why art became my sort of non-political politics, non-religious religion. I wish I could come here for relaxation every day. Being able to believe in abilities to protest against everything evil and boring through singing to yourself with headphones on the streets.

The video loop is annoying me a little, why couldn’t it just last forever in some way? But I guess then you would lose that impressing moment of a glamorous non-glamorous intro when the white wall falls down behind you and you find yourself standing on a non-stage street stage.

Reproduced drawings by Mi Kafchin on the walls. I couldn’t handle the manual slide projector. Theres people who know how this works, people existed in times before my time. Documentary Secret Years directed by Mária Takács, 2009, healing history gaps about queer people in East and central Europe. And a glimpse of beautiful images from the video Portrait of a Woman with Institution by Anna Anna Daučíková presented in a small institutional two person office chair room.

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.

There’s a hovering atmosphere of power exchange at Galleri Format in Malmö when Santiago Mostyn presents the exhibition How Important is Speed in a Revolution?

Art exhibition
How Important is Speed in a Revolution? by Santiago Mostyn.

Venue: Galleri Format, Malmö
Exhibition date: January 11 – February 24 2019

The sound fills the whole exhibition space. The beach filled with people starring at me, the camera taking a picture of the people. Slightly scary amplified sounds. Santiago Mostyn is used to putting oneself at centre of the artworks in ways that emphasises cultural otherness. 

The colours, warm sand, blue sky, clear water, ocher, earth, nature, dry plants. Lonely observing. Just as the sea, it’s just there. The police, arresting two topless black men.

Walking around a dubbel sided projection I’m observing still street life. Am I a tourist? Drums from an orchestra fades into the sound of the sea. I find myself rowing a boat.

Last time I saw works by Santiago Mostyn I was witnessing an uncomfortable interaction with the street life at Stureplan in Stockholm where images were composed to hard and rhythmic beats. Now the artist rows across the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to Greece. These works are quite slower in pace. The beauty is not in the beat in that sense. But I can feel the same hovering atmosphere of power conditions.

It scares me that I think of vacation when I look at these images, realising this is a journey that have taken many lives. This remake of a journey of many asylum seekers is peaceful and beautiful.

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.

What do you work with? It is often one of the first things we ask when we want to get to know each other. Drömjobb is a dance performance that in abstract ways shows that jobs mean so much more than what we do to get money.

Dance performance
Drömjobb by Anna Bontha, Johan Lundin, Nefeli Ikonomou and Britta Olsson
Dramaturgy: Anna Bontha and Johan Lundin
Dancer: Elise Brewer
Costume: Johan Lundin
Set design: Johan Lundin
Sound: Johan Lundin
Premiere stage: Skarpnäcks Kulturhus and Barnens Scen

Drömjobb makes comparisons between work and playfulness to visualise forward movements, development and construction of a team. It’s seriously funny for all ages. We get to see the colourful characters on stage enter different kinds of roles where some play leaders, some are controllers and some execute what is needed to be done.

What do they actually work with? For many of us, it is becoming increasingly difficult to answer that question, professions and tasks are becoming more and more diffuse. But, when the work is done together, a nice and strong team spirit and affinity is created just in that moment. In Drömjobb we get to take part in the work through a keyboard workout followed by a collective relaxation.

In a poetic and humorous way Drömjobb pinpoints how huge parts of our everyday lives revolve around actually having something sensible to do. We work with ourselves, with our relationships to other people and we work to keep moving forward.

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.

Strangers is an abstract blackbox larp by Nina Runa Essendrop. Divided in to two groups, separated with a tape border we create small societies with our own rules. What happens when a member from the other side is put in to our group?

Take off your shoes before you enter the black box, we are told. Artist and larp designer Nina Runa Essendrop is warm and welcoming. Most of us are new to this. We are soon divided in to two groups separated with a tape border. Through instructions we are developing a choreographic work together. I aim for getting better, evolving as a group into a complicated structure. Establishing a tiny world of rules and realities. I love this, creating something useless but yet so meaningful with our bodies together. Through gaze, touches, hands, smiles, feelings and silent comprehensions we are now organized in sync.

There is friction and insinuation to hierarchies between us but all this contributes to a familiar feeling of belonging together. I am surprised when the first member from the other side suddenly appears at my work station. I do not interrupt my choreography, no way, I ignore this obstacle and put myself in front of them. There is no room to be polite in this situation, my occupation comes first. If I interrupt this now the magic is gone, I would loose the strong connection to the ensemble. What happens now is up to the group.

Blackbox larps are live action role-playing games performed in a blackbox, a room with black walls and no windows where theatrical sound and light equipment can be used. The room also enhances stylised movements and expressions, bodies and objects put in to this room really matter, theres not much else to look at. We are guided on stage, the theatrical room, the light and the music takes me in to performance mode. The 4 hour long experience includes a warm up, developing period with break and a debrief afterwards where we get to discuss our experiences. Strangers was presented at Inter Arts Center in Malmö during Blackbox Sessions, a seminar exploring larp design and VR storytelling.

Graziella Loyrette

Influential Art Critic writing for Gallery Extra Magazine, Sun Times News and Gallery Extra TV.