PRESENTATION: Björn Lövin-The Surrounding Reality

Although Björn Lövin is the creator of some of the most important Swedish exhibitions in the last decades, Björn Lövin is one of the most underrated Swedish artists. Underrated in the sense that we have only just began to realize the importance of his work. Many of its layers have only now started to emerge – layers previously obscured by matters such as zeitgeist and our rigid manner of categorizing art as, for example, pop, minimalism or conceptual.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive

Björn Lövin was one of the first artists in Sweden to create spatial installations, then called environments, in the late 1960s, constructed out of carefully chosen details that together formed fictive worlds in which visitors could move around, made him one of Sweden’s first installation artists. “Surrounding Reality” is a unique exhibition project. None of Björn Lövin’s large environments have been preserved in their entirety. This may partly be why younger generations don’t know about his oeuvre, or are only familiar with individual works. Three of his large environments have been reconstructed “Consumer in Infinity and “Mr P’s Hoard””, (1971) Moderna Museet; “L’Image – Exposition de Björn Lövin pour International Life Assurance Company ILAC” (1981)originally shown at Centre Pompidou in Paris 1981, and “C – The Struggle for Reality” (1988) shown at Kulturhuset in Stockholm in 1988. Extensive research was required to make this exhibition possible. Based on photographs, archive material and interviews with Lövin’s friends, colleagues and family, objects have been identified and parts of the narratives and environments reconstructed. The environments are total works of art, like film sets made of meticulously chosen details, forming fictional worlds that we are invited to enter. It is important to note, however, that the installations that are now in place in the main gallery at Moderna Museet are merely interpretations of Lövin’s environments. The only available documentation of “Consumer in Infinity and “Mr P’s Hoard””, for instance, is black-and-white photographs and films. Together, the three environments in the exhibition raise issues and questions that are as urgent today as they were then. Relationships between individual and system, personal and collective, are explored, along with the increasingly dissolved boundary between fiction and reality. The gap between the welfare state and consumer society and excluded groups is revealed. Underpinning all the works is the recurring question: Whose reality is it? In “Consumer in Infinity and “Mr P’s Hoard”” Lövin presents the bleak socio-economic reality of a Swedish low-income earner, based on the Low-Income Report, which sparked intense debate in Sweden. There are two parts to the work: the fictional Mr P’s flat and a shopping street. A calculation shows that Mr P’s family has 441 kronor to spend after all the fixed expenses are paid. Per year. So the commodities in the shop windows are beyond their reach. A closer look reveals that what could initially be perceived as a definite critique of consumer mechanisms is actually more multifaceted. Several details show how the same mechanisms can also contribute to the so-called welfare state. Just like at Centre Pompidou in 1981, today’s visitors encounter six containers in the environment “L’Image”. The work reports on how the fictional insurance company ILAC monitors over a family that has been a fully insured and predictable life through its ILAC membership. A monitor is installed in each container, and three of them showing short sequences of surveillance footage of the French ILAC family. What may have seemed utopian in 1981 – a constant and voluntary surveillance of everyday life and the private sphere – is now something that has become a reality in many ways. Today, our lives are dominated by what the American writer, social psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. Lövin himself said that a visit to Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1967 had been pivotal to his artistic practice. According to him, the artefacts in the museum’s ethnographic exhibition “Arts primitifs dans les Ateliers des Artistes” challenged the contemporary view on art, labour and society and inspired his own practice. The reconstructed “C – The Struggle for Reality” consists of ten sculptural objects that can be interpreted as historical finds. C are society’s left-overs after the A and B teams have been selected by the labour market. C rejects the idea of employment, however, in favour of fully-automated production that frees up time for thinking and artistic creativity. The objects are presented with information about the site where they were found, with dates and short texts describing their presumed purpose in the C Culture.

Download Mr. P’s letter

Photo: Björn Lövin, Detail from C – The Struggle for Reality: Björn Lövin, The biological aeroplane, “IT WILL WORK”,, 1988 © Björn Lövin Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

Info: Curator: Matilda Olof-Ors, Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden, Duration: 2/4-18/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se