Dormant Quantity

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Dormant Quantity

Nov 28, 2020 – Fev 21, 2021

Lunds Konsthall

Dave Hullfish Bailey

The exhibitions at Lunds Konsthall start from our own position in time and space to allow us to understand the present. We reveal what concerns artists in our immediate surroundings, but we also try to look beyond this horizon, not least to gain a distance to ourselves. At times, retrospective views may be necessary and beneficial, but we remain focused on what is happening here and now.

In the exhibition Dormant Quantity Lunds Konsthall takes a closer look at a group of artists who live and work in the region, or who are knowledgeable about the local context. What all the participating artists have in common is that their work departs from stories and facts pertinent to a regional reality in southern Sweden.

Andreas Johansson

Åsa Norberg & Jennie Sundén

Caroline Martensson

Good knowledge of the history of the place from which we work helps us attain self-knowledge. The works in Dormant Quantity demonstrate how the present can become more clearly outlined when historical connections are updated and activated. In the essay for the catalogue, the working methods the participating artists have used to produce these works are described as genealogical from a Foucauldian point of view: an attempt to understand the present by highlighting its relationship to contradictory and conflicting narratives of the past.

Dormant Quantity presents a series of explorations of various spatial and temporal narratives highlighting local concerns. The exhibition’s six participating artists have all based their works on subjects that are connected to the geographical region that is currently called Scania (Skåne in Swedish). The current state of affairs that is presented is rooted in historical and global frameworks. However, the ties thus made between here and there, and past and present, are not uncontested – rather, they represent attempts to understand the present from a set of political, social, and material vantage points that can be highly variable – at times even contradictory.

Dave Hullfish Bailey

Kalle Brolin

The title of the exhibition is a reference to the fact that the shown works establish links between events and sites that might seem rather unexpected at first glance. Further, each participating artist highlights the particular aspects that allow these connections to be drawn at this particular moment in time. In other words, what they are doing is activating a cluster of nodes within a historical and geographical network that have been dormant until now.

The mentioned working method of the participating artists can be described as genealogical in kind. The word genealogy, which originally denoted the study of the historical ties that exist between humans or animals and their ancestors, was adopted by philosopher Michel Foucault in the late 1970s to describe a philosophy of history that was in no way preoccupied with linear connections or continuities.

Genealogy, rather, takes an interest in the way the present is characterized by conflicting, contradictory narratives. It allows the ambitions and incentives – the power, to put it bluntly – which underlie the established, homogenous mode of writing history to be brought to light. The present is influenced by the past, but this occurs in a variety of simultaneous ways.