Oil on canvas Mixed media 190x190 ,2006
"Cultural Mayham"
Fred Lindberg and Joanna Ageborn (both Swedish and second year students at London Metropolitan University’s Sir John Cass School of Art) curated the Festival, which included work by artists from several UK Art Schools, as well as incidental poetry, music and performance, all centred round the Pumphuset Gallery on the edge of town. Lindberg and Ageborn’s vision and energy in bringing a group of artists to the town, to interact and live together for a fortnight is really to be applauded. So too is the risk taken by Peter Hagsér (the Director of Trollhättan’s Konsthall) who gave them a space at the Pumphuset, the Summer Gallery, and freedom to shake the town up a bit. Especially when previous summer exhibitions in the exquisite 1910 former pumphouse building – almost a church in scale and form – have been devoted to more ‘hangable’ work (in the strict living-room sense). Calling it The (deviant) ART Festival seemed to be deliberately ambiguous. Was the ‘deviant’ in brackets to attract attention and curiosity, or a statement about the artists? Did the brackets suggest a provisional deviance, not quite deviant enough to risk frightening people away? Was it just universal shorthand for what contemporary art is supposed to be – challenging, shocking? I’d already looked at the show’s blog (http://sqrappy.blogspot.com) documenting the artists and their preparations. Mutilation and perhaps torture seemed to feature strongly, and made me feel a tad squeamish. How much deviance could I take? How much could the town take? Quite a lot, as it turned out, because the show was actually full of varied thought-provoking work, and the artists were inspired, inventive and funny too, as well as a little bit frightening.
Alison Carter
Joanna Ageborn’s edgy work – ‘Vertical Funeral’ is an elaborate memorial, On translucent tissue paper she has made sensitive, delicate and exact drawings of real suicides – deaths by hanging or strangulation – and pegged them on a line in a little brick outhouse, a shrine lit with candles. They are graceful depictions of the lineaments of death. Next to the shrine is a patch of ‘graveyard’, with many little white twig crosses packed very close together. Later, by way of explanation, she quotes the gypsy saying: ‘Bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all my life’. The piece honours suicides, who cannot be buried in sacred ground.
reviewed by Alison Carter
at the
(deviant)Art Festaval july 2006
No image satisfies unless it is at the same time knowledge. The objects the artist represents are repetitions of something we recognize: therein lies what is shocking and the artists’ power in forcing the viewer to be confronted with the ‘real’. It is made explicit and reflects us. It thereby produces a second level of trauma. It produces something real and the real is traumatic
Trollhättans Konsthall och Galleri Pumphuset
