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4/3/2011

Gifts of Intimacy

Tensta Konsthall, Spanga

curated by William Easton

Artists: Anastasios Logothetis, Corinna Schnitt, Hans Rosenström, Mako Ishizuka and Tina Torhamn

Works of art can be grandiose impositions, Ozymandian monuments they can also be close encounters, and confidential moments. The artists of the exhibition Gifts of Intimacy work with gestures that are local, personal and immediate. There is a generosity in these pieces an invitation to share or participate. The act of making becomes an act of giving and by turn, an exchange. It is here, in the mutuality of the gift, in the reciprocity of the act of giving that these works draw their communicative strength. Intimacy can be thought of as the result after a successful seduction but it can also be seen as emerging from a process of self-disclosure. As we share our feelings, aspirations, desires, thoughts and investigations we allow another to get closer to us, to know us better. To achieve real intimacy needs candour, sincerity and a willingness to show vulnerability. A practice of intimacy is far from risk free. It magnifies cultural difference, and we see ourselves and the other in sharper focus.

ANASTASIOS LOGOTHETIS
Anastasios Logothetis was born in Stockholm but lives and works in Athens. After abandoning an earlier career as a medical student in Boston Logothetis studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. His work has been included in exhibitions in the Espaco Avenida de Liberdade in Lisbon, Portugal and at Woburn Square Studios in London and this year he will publish an online piece in collaboration with Sparwasser HQ in Berlin. Later this year he will also start a residency at Residency Unlimited in New York.

Logothetis’ work moves across a number of registers. At times he is polemical offering us a manifesto, at other moments he is like a magician displaying a canny sleight of hand, and then again he shows us a glimpse into a private world peopled by his relatives and his own avatar. The curious of homunculus of his 2010 work Untitled (Stocktrading Apparatus) is both a public figure and a highly personal extension of the artist. The resulting video invites rather than displays and, as with much of his work we are complicit in the work.

CORINNA SCHNITT
The artist and filmmaker Corinna Schnitt, born in 1964 in Duisburg, is active on the German and international art scene. After training as a wood-carver, she studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach and at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf. For many years now she has made use of film in her work. She created a series of short experimental films in which daily phenomena are pushed to the limit like an endless spiral, witness Raus aus seinen Kleidern. Besides numerous video installations featured in museums and galleries, Schnitt shows her work in film festivals and on German television.

Corinna Schnitt makes use of the potentials of cinematic stagings to critically question everyday occurrences and human behaviour patterns in the context of normative demands and medial models. The images with which she puts social codes to the test are precisely arranged and composed. The collision of realism and staging as a means of deconstructing social nexuses and behavioural patterns becomes legible through her strict formal approach and pictorial language. In the following detailed consideration of Schnitt’s individual dealings with the media of video, emphasis will be placed on the significant utilisation of language, on the narrative element in her videos, as well as on the importance of her specific employment of cinematic means for the resulting pictorial language.

HANS ROSENSTRÖM
Born in Lohja in Finland Rosenström lives and works in Helsinki and Stockholm. He was educated at The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and at Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, He has had solo exhibitions at The Kluuvi Gallery at Helsinki City Art Museum and at the FAFA Gallery in Helsinki, Finland. He has also shown at Theaterhuset Avant Garden, Trondheim, Norway, MAP - Mobile Art Production in the exhibition Think about death at the Culture Festival in Stockholm and in the exhibition Street View in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey. This year he will exhibit at Moderna Museet Studio in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2010 he was a resident at IASPIS in Stockholm.

Rosenström work moves between public and private, between the theatrical and the intimate. He is as willing to make works that take only a couple of days and bear direct relation to place as he is to undertake architecturally scaled installations requiring complex technological solutions. His work Mikado from 2009 is a theatrical encounter for an audience of one, and is perhaps typical of his method, a text from Bergman’s Cries and Whispers is read by two voices that exist behind the listener as their own image changes in front of them in a mirror.

Rosenström plays with technology to bring it closer to us or create the magic of an intimate moment.

MAKO ISHIZUKA
Mako Ishizuka was born in Kobe in Japan and lives and works in Stockholm. She holds a BA in French literature from Kobe College and also a BA in fine art from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Subsequently she also studied both at Goldsmiths in London and took an MA at the Malmö Academy of Art. She has had solo shows at Galleri Ping-Pong in Malmö, Galleri 5 in Lund and at Gallery Naïve in Stockholm. She has also exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art in Hiroshima and at Galleri Andréhn-Schiptjenko in Stockholm and has had projects at The Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm and Ateliê Trêsnovesete in São Paulo. Ishizuka has had a resident at IASPIS in Stockholm and currently has a recidency at Capacete in Brasil.

Ishizukas’ work is characterised by a fascination for details, and a self-investigation of her role as outsider. A characteristic work is her Rainbow after my breakfast where her feeling of detachment from Swedish society prompted an act that was both romantic and gentle. The viewer often becomes a participant in her works as in her Not even if it appeared from 2005 where the viewer completed the work by entering a seemingly empty gallery whilst a projected image was presented to the street. In her 2003 piece Table Talk four visitors are brought together and listen to a sound work that encourages a social interaction between them. In her ongoing project Solitary Acts she works immediately and directly with the city environments that surround her. In all her work Ishizuka invites, gives, offers up and encourages participation.

TINA TORHAMN
Tina Torhamn was born in Skövde, Sweden, in 1947 but passed away prematurely in 2007. From the 1970’s onwards she produced a body of work, sadly overlooked, that in retrospect and particularly within a history of women artists in Sweden can be seen as ground breaking. As a sculptor she used materials such as concrete, marble, glass, bronze and polished steel and her major works such as her massive 1977 cast concrete text piece Jag är så rädd…. place her in the forefront of a wave of artists who emerged in the seventies and were concerned with issues of identity and gender politics. This work although made as a public sculpture and shown in The Swedish city of Södertälje, no longer exists, but reveals her as an artist both willing to expose her own vulnerability and at the same time make bold and uncompromising statements.

This same sense of integrity follows in much of her subsequent work where she often reveals highly personal and intimate investigations. Bronze portraits of her family, food works in baked pastry and concrete and text-based works reflect on issues of gender, stereotype, and the role of women in society

During her life time Torhamn has made several public commissioned works and also exhibited at Kulturhuset, Riksutställningar and the National Museum in Stockholm and elsewhere.

Image: Mako Ishizuka - Dodda Maggy - photo

Vernissage: saturday 5 March 12.00 - 17.00

Tensta Konsthall
Taxingegrand 10 - Spanga Svezia
Opening hours: wed-sat 12 - 17

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