Occidental Totems

2011, HD video 16:9, color with sound, 15 minutes, on omnimount stands

Occidental Totems immerses the viewer into the life of a controversial artist: Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), mentor of Henry Moore, who will narrate the story of the statues he carved on the facade of the old Zimbabwe Embassy in London. The primitivist figures depicted a deviant humanity but got mutilated by the colonial power. In a fictional shift, Epstein who praised this exotic “other” seems to enter into a trance himself: the statues talk to him and give an account of a new radical reading of history.

The Scandinavian Housewife’s Disease

2010, Double-sided light box, color picture depicting a human embryo on day 24 by Lennart Nilsson and a Diphyllobothrium broad tapeworm, 47 x 47 cm.

Counter

2010, Installation with 35 fluorescent lights, five-digit counter based on the emigration from Sweden in 2009 estimated by Statistiska CentralByrån (Statistics Sweden), programmed by: Michael Möller, 140 x 360 cm

Work in collaboration with Shirin Sabahi

According to Statistics Sweden, in 2009 around 39242 of the registered population moved abroad. The installation is a five-digit counter made of fluorescent light bulbs that accumulates the number of this fraction of population. Every 13 minutes and 26 seconds, one unit is added which indicates one person is lessened from the Swedish population. The enlarged figure of public statistics gets a life of its own and subversively triggers the projected image of Sweden as one of the ultimate destinations of migration. Hinting on the emigrant crowd, the work refers to different temporalities in the present as well as the past; the trauma of losing one fourth of Swedish population in the late 1800 and early 1900, which among other reasons gave birth to the social welfare system, as a solution that the Swedish state could survive the castration of its population.

Projections

2010, Overhead projection installation with two black and white transparent A4 prints depicting illustrations from the Swedish periodical Läsning för folket (Reading for The People) in 1869, dimensions variable.

Work in collaboration with Shirin Sabahi

The installation is based on the projected image of America by Per Svensson, a fictive Swedish character and the reality he faces in the America which is the projected image of the Swedish state on America in 1869, when immigration to America by Swedes was accelerated. By engaging in projection and phantasm, the work intertwines the psychic and the social realm and by means of the object of representation – Native Americans – frames an already framed image of the other.

The Tombstone Where Karl Marx Was Buried, Highgate Cemetery, London 1883 – The Chalk Cliff Where The Ashes Of Friedrich Engels Were Scattered, Eastbourne 1895 – The Erection Of The New Tomb Of Karl Marx, Highgate Cemetery, London 1956 – The Taking Down Of The Statue Of Stalin With Chalk Marks On His Face, Budapest 1956

2010, 4 framed color pictures, 50 x 50 cm each

“The tombstone where (…)” is a work which conflate two notions of personification. The way materialist philosophers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels chose to face death according to their convictions, and how their legacy has been diluted through time by the construction and deconstruction of memorial and official worshipping.

Untied (Flag)

2009, textile patchwork with texts, 500 x 330 cm

Work in collaboration with Malin Pettersson Öberg

In our world the flag has always been a symbolic object, meant to represent and identify a certain people with its country, a nation with its state. It endorses a finite and simple meaning, by a finite shape and composition: three vertical stripes constituting a rectangle, the width double to its height, and by color code: blue and red for the city of Paris, surrounding white for the king and God. In “Untied (Flag)”, the plain color stripes are replaced by a complex and diverse patchwork of African fabrics. To this composition of stripes, a second composition is added, with fields containing names of beauty shops, travel agencies, hotels and bars in the French-African community. The logic of the flag as a symbol, where shape and meaning merge, is twisted twice and becomes an allegory.

De-Nigration

2009, Two framed landscape A1 posters, 84 x 59.4 cm, black paint.

It is a ritual, at the arrival at the White House, every president of the United of America – and especially their wife – has to make a selection of artworks to be hung in the building.

It is a ritual, after all selection of artworks, political analysts and art critics can’t prevent themselves but comment this choice, in a drive where all artists / artworks become subsumed with a quite literal political purpose.

for this work i wanted to rely on an artist for whom political conscience and aesthetics were intrinsequely bound: Otto Neurath. Borrowing his universal vosual language he coined ISOTYPE, i juxtapose the decenal census of the different races of the american population on one side and the labelisation of the artists present in the White House from art reviews / papers.

Research material

Field Trip

2009, Projection of a still image, 63000 X 63000 pixels, adaptable size, collection of all the images listed by Google on “Sol LeWitt”, Feb 9th 2009

Between definition and investigation, Field Trip proposes a new method of grasping or re-interpreting the work of one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art: Sol LeWitt. On a certain date, I collected all the 951 pictures proposed by Google when typing the artist’s name, in one document of 63000 by 63000 pixels. The found images are assembled into a finite shape – a square – by their order of appearance and with their original size and quality. This collection provides us with an odd encyclopedic overview of all the documentation publicly available on Sol LeWitt. The de-contextualization and cognitive hierarchy offered by Google cast a new and interesting light over conceptual art comprehension nowadays.

(In)finite Dimension

2009, Cube made of semi-reflexive mirror, glass paint, light blub, 47X47X47cm, 0,1 m3 of infinite.

The concept of God was for the first time distorted in the early 40′s by a famous logician and close companion of Albert Einstien : Kurt Gödel. The undertaking of this notion, usually approached in terms of belief or non-belief made its first entry into the field of logics. The existence of God can be demonstrated as true or non true, provable or not provable. My art piece echoes the paradox embodied by Gödel’s arithmetic formula. Printed inside a cube whose faces are made of mirrors turned inwards, the ontological definition seems to reflect itself towards the infinite, as in a mise-en-abyme scenery. The light-bulb at the centre of the mirror cube allows, when lit, the gaze of the spectator to see the multiplied reflections inside through one semi-reflective mirror. (From outside to inside the semi-reflective mirror is like glass, on the contrary: from inside to outside it is entirely reflective.) In a process where the unquantifiable is quantified, a definition of something indefinable is centrally located.