Katarina Elvén, Kentaro Hiroki, Sofie Josefsson, Emma Kay, Johan Thurfjell
16 September–30 October 2005
Opening Friday 16 September 7-9pm
Move Your Past challenges us to reformulate and redefine our history/histories but it also reflects on the fact that this is precisely what we are doing when we sort and reconstruct our personal memories. The works in this exhibition show the transfer of a past, both in a mental and physical sense.
Sofie Josefsson’s work raises questions about the physical and psychological aspects of surface and spatiality. Her wall drawing Rester (Remains) leaves traces of a possible past while the collapse of space leaves the viewer in a strange situation in which it is difficult to determine what is real and what is not. Is the explosion of her own kitchen the result of some sort of political subversion or of controlled chaos?
Katarina Elvén works with questions pertaining to interior, perception, depth and surface. With her video Travelling the Surface she builds up a constructed, dense and coherent picture of a typically modernist architecture in which the viewer is only allowed to penetrate as far as the surface of the façade. What is to be found on the inside, or at least what sort of narratives every camera-panning can be imagined to contain, is left to the viewer to determine.
In his work Johan Thurfjell examines the relationship between himself, the world around him and the role of the personal in the writing of history. In Tillbakablick (som om det varit en övning)/ Looking back (as if it had been a rehearsal) from 2003, his memory of a parting at an airport becomes a metaphor for a future separation.
Emma Kay takes her own memory as her point of departure. Using drawing and video she has re-told the great narratives like the Bible and the History of the World. By examining the limits of memory and letting her subjective version become universal Emma Kay challenges accepted history while playfully making visible the unchallengeable status of the classics and arguing for the possibility of daring to remember “wrong”. At Signal she is showing Shakespeare From Memory (1998), a work consisting of 26 parts.
Kentaro Hiroki is showing a series of pencil drawings entitled Backside of photographs, 2004—05. In these he has copied/drawn the backsides of photographs from the early 20th century. The photographs were taken by Western explorers in Asia as well as by King Rama V on a journey around the world at the beginning of the century. In his work Hiroki touches on issues such as how cultural identity is created, how it is expressed and how it is handed down.
