Past exhibitions

2003

JANNA HOLMSTEDT (Sweden)
"Limitcruisers"

2008-04-25 − 2008-05-18

Opening Friday April 25th, 18-21

Artist talk at 19.00

Janna Holmstedt’s work is conceptual and often narrative in form. It involves image, text, video and installations, as well as interventions in the urban landscape.
Holmstedt lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. She graduated 2004 with an M.F.A from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. Recent awards include Artist-in-Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA (2007), IASPIS International Exchange (2006), Swedish Visual Arts Fund, project grant (2005), NIFCA, Nordic Artist in Residence, Tallinn, Estonia (2005). For a more detailed resumé please visit www.jannaholmstedt.com

The exhibition at 300m3 Art Space consists of video, drawings and photography. Thematically it circles around a western conception of individuality and strive for autonomy. Holmstedt focuses on the tension between an existentially defined ”inner” space and that which we typically perceive as an ”outer” space of politics and everyday life.
In her work, questions related to identity and the different strategies we acquire to define ourselves in relation to others and our environs are repeatedly explored.

Putting Together With Light is a manipulative, poetic and instructive video installation. The title refers to the process in which plants store energy from the sun, but also how the human eye and brain process visual information.
The visitors are asked to lay down beneath a tilted screen and listen to a narrated story in headphones. One hears and sees references to photosynthesis, photography, the evolution of the eye, lapses and absence of continuity, and eventually about loss of memory and sight. The soundscape contains several voices, ambient soundtrack, silence and sounds from the sun as well as the human body. The narrative is sometimes interrupted by instructions on how the listener should behave. The intension is to create a concentrated viewing situation where the visitors’ bodily sensations are enhanced.
The sound and imagery can be associated with relaxation, indoctrination, color therapy, education or even hypnosis.

In the work The Construction of Landscapes we see a park-like area, which is situated in the large residential district Lasnamäe in Tallinn, Estonia. It is a former dumpsite from Soviet times when the suburb was built – a big open space with no name, a culture-nature-culture takeover in the making. In the photographs and documented intervention, the famous Rükenfigur of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) is used.
Henrik Gustafsson writes about the photograph in Out of Site. Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema 1969-1974:

“The exhibit adresses a number of key tenets in landscape studies; how certain compositional elements – the lateral form, the repoussoirs, and the twilight implement unity and depth, but also how landscape was developed in tandem with an ideology of bourgeois individualism that instigated alienation not only by standing apart from a communal experience but also apart from nature. In the Romantic tradition, this faceless, silhouetted figure, conventionally understood as a surrogate for the spectator, silently transfixed before a horizon dividing land and sky became an ubiquitous device for evoking the sublime.”

The theme of an alienated, bourgeois individual can also be traced in Holmstedt’s graphite drawings. Here the relation to a landscape is as good as erased. Instead the ambivalent, solitary subjects portrayed relate to fragmented phrases such as “Successful Self-criticism”, “Containment Policy”, ”I’m More Individual than You”, etcetera. If any, it is a media landscape, or the immaterial fluctuations of the stock market, that serve as a background for the gestalt.

www.jannaholmstedt.com