ON VIEW:
Lena Bergendahl - The Celestial Equator
5 - 20 May
Gallery opening hours: Thurs - Sun 14-18, Hälsingegatan 33
As the finale of the spring season Minibar is thrilled to present the The Celestial Equator by Lena Bergendahl.
The exhibition consists of the three video works, Diffractions, Reflections and Formations, which together make up the trilogy The Celestial Equator. In the series, Bergendahl (with the help of two Kenyan women) creates a subtle play with various (pseudo) sciences, such as creating an illusion of the northern light, exploring abstract shapes and surfaces and by immersing in an artificial, dreamlike waterscape.
By generating powerful and visually colourful experiences she highlights the transition between the physical and the illusive. Through movement and by pointing to the world´s ephemeral and fragile processes, she unfolds thoughts of the passing of time and the constant flux in which we live. How the physical world never ceases to move, and we never cease to move with it.
Lena Bergendahl (b. 1982) obtained an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2010. Recent presentations include her MFA degree show at Galleri Mejan in Stockholm, screenings in Kenya, Australia, Japan, Norway and Bulgaria. The exhibition at Minibar is the first time The Celestial Equator is shown.
PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS:
Sofia M. Westin - The End of North, as seen from the sea
31/3 - 15/4
For the upcoming two shows in March, Minibar extends the exhibition period into a dialogue that grows out from two subsequent separate exhibitions.
Part two, The end of North, as seen from the sea faces the kind of subjectively experienced distance that appears in a venturesome attempt to revisit a nostalgic environment and re-live its connected experiences. The longing towards a place resigns into a veiled projection: a de-attaching feeling of distance is inevitable since the remembered moment is always out of reach. The distinction between the self and the territory becomes a false dichotomy; and the distinction between perception and physical matter is the result of the hazy, remembered and veiled perspective.
The objects in the installation presented at Minibar can be seen as souvenirs, commemorative merchandise stolen from an undefined location, eager to show off a varnish that swears their validity. But instead, they reveal the veiled misleading perspective, including false geographic information. As tokens of remembrance, the objects have no real significance other than through nostalgic connections and as symbols of past experience and cannot be articulated other than through empathy and the notion that all conditioned existence is in fact always in a state of veiled flux.
Also presented is the third and last part in the In Dialogue: series, We Start Forward. It makes up by the presentation of a small publication, a fanzine-style booklet archiving conversations, sketches and progress that evolved from the making of the subsequent exhibitions at Minibar in March (by Anna Sagström and Sofia M. Westin). By highlighting the collective conversation behind the two individual presentations, Minibar wishes to extend the meaning of the works presented, as well as dig deeper into the process and methodology used. The pamphlet is available upon request (info@minibarartistspace.com)
Anna Sagström - Come Undone
10/3 - 25/3
For the upcoming two shows in March, Minibar extends the exhibition period into a dialogue that grows out from two subsequent separate exhibitions.
Part one, Come Undone by Anna Sagström explores an abstract and shattered notion of a free fall. You are falling, but there is no ground to fall towards. Instead you face a sense of groundlessness, without stable foundations for metaphysical claims or psychological stability. This hypothetical vacuum serves both as liberation as well as corruption: a freedom bound to restriction is still freedom for a time. In this state of flux, perspectives are twisted and multiplied and you risk losing any sense of orientation; of yourself, your body and your boundaries.
The works on display at Minibar can be seen as temporary, brittle and partial attempts at grounding. Material formations and fragmental sound-works are connected through an apparent emptiness and introversion, with a withdrawal from the ability to communicate through the use of spoken language. The forms are floating or falling, an escalating linear perspective (taken from a Chopin prelude, with a manic adding of harmonies) gets broken and deconstructed. The individual works appear to be in different stages of ruin and inability of keeping together, which both grapples with and are being held up by Minibar’s well-defined and formal exhibition space.
Kira Carpelan - Kata
18/2 - 4/3
In February, Minibar shows Kata by Kira Carpelan, a show with video and drawings that is part of the artist’s on going project about the model (person) and the performance (performative).
The artist herself acts in front of the camera, dressed and moves like a dancer. A movement is created trough transitions from various classical model poses copied from fashion magazines. We see outlines for a choreography, but the movement can also be likened to patterns used in martial arts to memorize the positions of the different techniques.
In a number of works Kira Carpelan has worked with stereotyping, with what she calls the "flat image”, an image that in fact is made up from many different pictures but reduced through simplification. In the work at display at Minibar, Carpelan examines the “flat image” within fashion. By exposing, mimic, re-create and re-enact different versions of these found pictures, she tries another ways of looking at the pictures of people - in particular women, produced and re-produced in many different contexts.
Ilja Karilampi - Hoodumentary ~ SELECT CROWD
8/1 - 12/2
Minibar is happy to present Berlin based artist Ilja Karilampi (b. 1983) as our first exhibitor of the new year. The show, entitled hoodumentary ~ SELECT CROWD is Karilampi’s first solo-exhibition in Stockholm.
The exhibition consists of the video work h00dumentary (22 min 52 sec), presented in a fortifying mixed media installation especially created for Minibar. By intermingling first-hand footage, homemade VHS clips, animated logos and an unconventional aesthetic the artist depictures a meeting between Studiegången in Gothenburg (were he grew up), and the former projects of Biljmer outside of Amsterdam; painting a somewhat subjective meta-portrait of the hood as a cultural phenomenon.
Karilampi expands his projects through incorporating secret alias, alter egos, social events and a discretionary form of performance. The interactive installation on display at Minibar cleverly makes use of the room and the audience to transgress the boundaries of the aesthetic and the sometime exclusionary theme of his work. The totality of the work presented becomes a window and an opening into an ongoing investigation by the artist, filled with personal references, existential views and abstractionism.
As the latter part of the exhibition title (hoodumentary ~ SELECT CROWD) suggests, Minibar presents a project that plays with the site specific composition and uses the gallery’s visitors to highlight a particular audience: the artist’s audience,
~ the select crowd.
Hanna Ljungh - How to Civilize a Waterfall
21/12 - 8/1
Exhibition on display 24/7
During the extended Christmas period Minibar has especially invited Hanna Ljungh to exhibit the piece How to Civilize a Waterfall. The essence of the exhibition is the spatial complexity of the gallery, the viewer’s standpoint and the juncture of the exhibition period. Ljungh’s video will be projected non-stop around the clock and is accessible from the outside.
The positioning of the video installation reflects the duality underlying the spirit of Christmas and highlights the resulting tensions between religious and secular celebration and angst. The constant on-going video installation refers to a Christmas display window when seen from the street outside the gallery. Ljungh’s installation seduces and invites the visitor through the glass. And just like a display at Christmas time, the window in the exhibition space has a contradicting function: to entice but also to exclude.
In the video, Hanna Ljungh performs an authoritative confrontation with nature, an indifferent and independent force. Inspired by the dramatic expressiveness of hard rock music, Ljungh challenges nature. The work shows a furious woman trying to persuade a waterfall to follow her orders. Screaming and gesticulating, she makes a fruitless attempt to convince the waterfall of the benefits of turning into a hydroelectric power plant.
The work reveals man’s comical and paradoxical relationship with nature. The encounter becomes an emotional and almost spiritual experience - an encounter with ones self. Hanna Ljungh has conducted, for the past several years, an investigation on humanity’s concept of nature. We cannot communicate with it. Nature serves our own current purpose as we reflect ourselves in it. Nature, Ljungh explains, is a foreign and estranged other – without identity and impossible to grasp.
Eric Length - Living on Air
25/11 -18/12
The exhibition presents a series of ink paintings on paper and mixed media sculptures. The title of the show, Living on Air, suggests a paradox that embodies a dynamic of rejection and belief that Length investigates throughout the exhibition. By using the polemics of duality he adds value to the works themselves, but also creates an imbalance and dynamic between the works and their placement, scale and material presence.
The amount of ink used in the paintings causes the images to elicit physical qualities, thus moving away from the constraints of an image. Other materials mixed in the ink, such as glitter and nail polish, allude to the artist’s interest in the Goth movement and the use of subcultural attributes and paraphernalia. It is the process of evading both the figurative and the abstract that renders the painterly surface to a hybrid form. Taking its starting point in a perceived deprivation of meaning and values in images, the process reflects the artist’s regret for unbelieving. Nevertheless, and while still unbelieving, the experience and outcome harbours a mute and inexpressible desire.
Although opposing through their distinguishable elements, the sculptures concur with the images. The metal construction of the larger of the two sculptures balances between fragility and endurance and materializes a dualism that prevails in all of Length’s work on display at Minibar. The result is an effort that neither approaches nor withdraws from the use of language.
NEXT EVENT:
tba
PREVIOUS EVENTS:
MINIBAR:
Minibar Artist Space is a non-profit project based exhibition space for contemporary art located in Vasastan, Stockholm, Sweden. It is run and curated by artists Hanna Frostell, Malin Henningsson, Sofia M. Westin, Åsa Norman and Anna Sagström.
Minibar is created as a platform for presenting short-time exhibitions, collaborations and other art-related projects of all media. The short exhibition periods are used as a tool to re-strategise the principle elements of the exhibition format. It opens up to a fluctuation and tempo and enables a sense of spontaneity, complexity and optimism that is at the core of the Minibar philosophy. Regardless of medium, Minibar wishes to occupy the interstices of contemporary art practices with this attitude.
The limited size of Minibar allows innovative site-specific solutions that re-examines the use of the gallery room. The space becomes an active parameter for the artists to take in to account when working in the room; the limited space can either be used as a catalyst or counteraction. By the use of set themes each season Minibar aims to connect the practice of individual presentations to an overall connecting idea, enabling discussions to be held on an overriding transformative and ephemeral level as well as manifested through specific concretizations.
Minibar wishes to promote artwork and practices from local cultural producers as well as artists from outside of the Stockholm region, featuring both established and emerging artists. Whether through solo-exhibitions or interdisciplinary collaborations, Minibar aims to produce projects and initiatives that reflect upon the role of the artist and the art-exhibition at large. The gallery space, which is located in close proximity to some of Stockholm’s foremost commercial galleries, wishes to use this location as an opportunity to exist parallel, and sometimes in opposition, to the established art market as a non-profit artist space.
Minibar is a non-commercial initiative and is so far funded by the founders themselves.
CONTACT:
MINIBAR
Hälsingegatan 33
113 31 STOCKHOLM
+4673644271
+4915783553430
info@minibarartistspace.com