ART-PRESENTATION:A Malmö Trilogy-Armaturer

One single scene is told from a number of different perspectives. We recognise this approach from the world of cinema, theatre, literature, but what if we were to present an exhibition this way? We tell each other stories in order to live. We tell each other stories in order to dream and imagine, to let ideas slowly percolate through our minds and shape a larger collective consciousness. “Armaturer” is the first chapter of “A Malmö Trilogy”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Signal Archive

Three artists have been invited to work on the exhibition “A Malmö Trilogy: Armaturer” which will be told in three chapters throughout the spring. Each chapter has a leading voice, yet each chapter is the sum of a collaborative exploration that guides us through the multiple folds that compose a practice. Idiosyncratic, unexpected, inconsistent bare meanings we like. The leading voice of the first chapter, “Armaturer” is Selma Sjöstedt, a voice spoken from a point of stillness. Painting is her language, and traces are her words with which she composes visual rhythms. By waiting and observing she lures the poetics out of the marks left on old canvases. Like an improvised call and response. And like armature, her works made for this chapter act as supporting structures for a collegial dialogue. Responding to her visual rhythms is what Angelica Falkeling and Sara Lindeborg have set out to do forming interwoven sentences that move in and out of each other. Sara Lindeborg’s manuscripts gather fragments on human traces in the New Mexican landscape, while Angelica Falkeling adds a spatial collage of ingredients from their own universe and domestic art practice. And thus, a contamination of the individual practice gives way for the rise of a collaborative endeavour. Angelica Falkeling make site-specific installations and work with exhibition formats that include live performance, textile, sculpture, moving image, and text-based works. They are concerned about the economic and ecological aspects of artistic production from a queer, feminist, and intersectional point of view. In the scale of the domestic, their persona often appears as a queer instigator, tailor, and storyteller who experiment with different textile craft techniques passed on through cross-generational dialogues, humor and geological time. Their work departs from and within the body. They respond to sites via material recycling and social relations. In their collaborative work, they think through emotional adaptation in relation to the social. They are also trained as a seamstress and regulary create costume designs and take on sewing commissions for other artists such as; Rana Hamadeh, Frieder Heller, Katherine MacBride, Pilar Mata Dupont, Evelyn Taocheng Wang and Katarina Zdjelar. Sara Lindeborg is an artist living and working in Malmö, Sweden. Her paintings, writings and collective projects investigate the ways that paintings attract and innovate their receivers, with a focus on vernacular language and interspecies communication. The work, which often departs from art historical materials, traces female strategies and experiences of working from the position of exile within language and culture. Images of proximity, difference, fragility, decay, seasons, animals, plants and ground are gathered, quoted and intensified in paintings that strive towards polylinguality. These momentary tones and rhythms are contrasted by the materials’ promise of permanence and memory. The paintings quote dialects from: pastoralism, abstraction, fashion, textile, anonymous ornament and popular culture. They want to put forward what is considered tasteless, excessive, inappropriate, impure, useless or too pretty. Her writings, compositions of quotations, transcriptions and rewritings, compiled with notes from personal experience, are organized to offer support for the main work, as transition pieces for the viewer and to give the paintings space.

Info: Signal – Center for Contemporary Art, Monbijougatan 17H, Malmö, Duration: 14/3-5/4/20, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 12:00-18:00, www.signalsignal.org