Fragmented Realities

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June 7 – August 18, 2019

Goteborgs Konsthall

Monika Grzymala, Maze_VR_one,two,three,four, 2018. Photo Hendrik Zeitler

In the natural sciences, scientists have succeeded in breaking down living systems into their smallest constituents: genes and molecules. The human body has been split into billions of fragments, giving us unique knowledge of life and man. At the same time it’s just a perception of the complex system constituting the whole. To understand how everything is connected we need to see how the big and small interact.

Here, in the oscillation between microcosm and macrocosm, chaos and order, dissonance and harmony, disintegration and structure, we find the core of this summer’s group show, which presents five artists: Anastasia Ax, Alina Chaiderov, Serina Erfjord, Monika Grzymala and Henrik Håkansson. In various ways the artists pose questions around what happens when something is broken down into particles, or examine what happens when matter, structures and systems disintegrate. In installation, video, painting and sculpture, the artists explore the new realities born from the fragmented universe of disintegration.

Monika Grzymala, Raumzeichnung (non-finito), 2019. Photo Hendrik Zeitler

Monika Grzymala

Monika Grzymala’s work consists of several kilometers of tape. In her works she challenges traditional painting by bursting its frame and creating spatial installations, which remind us of the force of explosions or organic parasites.

Serina Erfjord, Among Stars, 2009-2014. Photo Hendrik Zeitler

Serina Erfjord’s work Among Stars is a poetic and tranquil depiction of the photograph’s smallest elements. Here the image is transformed into small particles of light and silver floating weightlessly around in a black space, like a starry sky. Erfjords work is on display June 7 – August 6, 2019.

Henrik Håkansson, Aug.11, 2012 The Symptoms of the Universe Studies (6 min 29 sec), 2012. Photo Hendrik Zeitler

Henrik Hakansson, The Symptoms of the Universe

Henrik Håkansson’s work The Symptoms of the Universe shows in slow motion a tree exploding into fragments and presented in its physical form in the space. The tree splinters and remnants confront us with a new universe in which the tree’s disintegration allows us to reflect on human beings’ relationship to the various events of life, and the cycle of nature and society.

Anastasia Ax, The World as of Yesterday, 2013-2019. Photo Hendrik Zeitler

Anastasia Ax’s work and performance The World As of Yesterdaycan be regarded as both a creative process and an act of destruction. She uses large bales consisting of thousands of compressed layers of recycled paper. With violent force, Ax breaks up the paper and lets ink flow over the installation. Here she deconstructs the white cube and blackens its walls and symbolic value. The work is a strong and irrevocable comment on our consumer society, and forms an archive of the unwanted.

Alina Chaiderov, Untitled (Concrete Kid), 2015-2019. Photo Hendrik Zeitler

Alina Chaiderov’s work Untitled (Concrete Kid) is an abstract composition consisting of a grey-painted piece of linoleum and newspaper spreads, with the news overpainted and erased in the same universal grey color. Some 50 neon yellow tennis balls challenge the symmetrical order through their placement both inside and just outside this framework. Through displacements and movements in sculptural compositions, Chaiderov addresses themes such as matter, memory, time and space.