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CONTINUOUS PRESENT
April 17 – May 3, 2009
Opening April 16, 17.00-23.00
Hartmut Stockter (D)
Jani Ruscica (FIN)
Joel Hurlburt (US/SE)
Emma Hammarén (SE)
Continuous present is one thing and beginning
again and again is another thing. These are both things. And
then there is using everything.
- Gertrude Stein
What we see is never the entire picture. The
continuous passage of time makes unintelligible the
composition of present events. While looking back gives a
more informed perspective on the past, it smothers the
ambiguities embedded in each moment. We are always in the
present, which we ourselves obscure.
This exhibition brings together four artists of
different nationalities and backgrounds. The connection
between their practices is not so much in content as in the
way it is processed. The point of departure may be a desire
for knowledge or progress, but through their process there
is an attention to the present moment. The artists approach
the world with curiosity, doing so from the only perspective
at hand, the subjective. The constant change in time becomes
a material and a part of their work.
Jani Ruscica's
video work "Evolutions” draws out individual beginnings from
a much broader narrative. The seven scenes in the film, the
seven stories about worldviews and the universe, have been
created together with a group of teenagers who share a
passion for theatre. The stage for each scene is set up in a
film studio, a temporary surface of projection for each
person´s worldview. The line that comes out of the darkness
is a beginning, but not the beginning. "This
version starts here" the girl says, another begins somewhere
else.
Jani lives and works in Helsinki, and studied at the
Finnish Art Academy in Helsinki, as well as Chelsea College
of Art and Design in London.
In Emma Hammarén's
work something has been happening, we were not
present at its start, but things have progressed, been
generating and degenerating, seemingly at once. The work
originates in the personal, but through time transcends into
a realm of shared experience/history. At Studio 44 she will
show an installation constructed from the remnants of
disassembled books. Images and fragments of text are taken
out of context and arranged anew. One order is given over to
another.
Emma studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design in
London, before returning to Stockholm, where she has
continued to live and work.
Joel Hurlburt sides with using
everything. Any material or object has the potential to
find a place in his work. His tunnels and passages take many
forms, as they reach from one plain into another. In his
installation “Trouble in the stairway, trouble in the hall”,
mundane items and uncanny objects occupy a common space,
where the handrail leads only to itself, and the hall carpet
comes to a confounding end.
Joel is from the US and moved to Stockholm after
studying Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art, in
Boston, and Literature at Hartwick College, in New York
State.
Hartmut Stockter's inventions, in
their attempt to aid viewing the natural world instead get
in the way (as is the case with so much technology). They
are handmade devices, apparently assembled from metal, wood
and plastic materials in the workshop of an inventive
craftsman, but practicality and functionality are clearly
not prioritised. An apparatus that carries a painting in
front of one’s face helps to preserve a more desirable image
of the world. The frame holds the known and created world up
to the ever-changing and never-matching beyond.
Hartmut Lives and works in Copenhagen. His studies have
taken him to Norway, Germany and Greenland.
VERNISSAGE torsdag 16 april kl 17
- 23
16 april – 3 maj 2009
Öppettider: ons–fre 12–18, lö–sö 12–16. |
