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13/5/2010

Annika Eriksson

Daad Galerie, Berlin

Annika Eriksson is a pioneer of the early 1990s artistic tendency to put real situations and social interaction into the center of project-oriented and performative art. Eriksson is known for initiating everyday situations, collective actions, and presentations that are manifest in video or film installations and as photographs in the exhibition space. The participants, or rather those who are portrayed, act within an artificial and playful frame provided by the artist, in which the ‘free speech’ of each action takes possession of the exhibition space in a largely autonomous manner. With minimal technical efforts, long-lasting takes and a fixed camera the filmic works mark out a transparent line of separation between documentation and staging, between reality and fiction, simultaneously playing with the idea of the group portrait, from August Sander to today’s obligatory I.D. photos of company employees.

For a long time Eriksson has concerned herself with the notion of work and ‘working-worlds.’ Be it staff interviews with the workforce of various international museums, an insurance firm in Munich, or a research and development department of VW in Wolfsburg, she let’s each worker have their own say and thereby reveals relationships between the individual and the corporation and the social interaction of the workers – often also with a view into each company’s architecture. At the same time, Eriksson’s sociological evidence points out certain social upheavals and increasingly depleted social contexts.

Many of Eriksson’s works which concern the public and urban space mirror social processes and radical changes likewise. Here the differences of social interaction, of ideas of the collective and of the (states of) consciousness of the people become evident. Since the year 2000, Eriksson has been documenting on video various activities and situations taking place in the public space (‘People in Public Spaces’) thus, presenting social reality in the manner of a readymade. Recently Eriksson focused more on methods of staging and storytelling, for example, in the three-part film series and site-specific installation about Regent’s Park in London called “For the Wealthy and the Good” (2008).

At the daadgalerie Eriksson will be showing a new piece, “Wir sind wieder da,” which was produced in Berlin and which has an indirect relationship to the city. Eriksson staged a ghostly tableau vivant in the middle of an empty building plot, which will be displayed in the daadgalerie as a film installation. The film consists of three, slightly varying, long takes of a nightly scene, a group portrait of punks and dogs. The minimal action of the film and the punks’ interaction with each other show a particular social belonging to a timeless micro- or subculture. On the other hand, the overall picture marks out a blank space or vacuum in a time of upheavals, a condition which contains fragments of the past without any traces or hints of the future. The transition period is emphasized by cross-cuts of a subway ride through shutdown subway stations in East Berlin during the time of the GDR.

Annika Eriksson was born in Malmö in Sweden in 1956. In 2002/03 she was a guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm/ DAAD. Next to the solo exhibition “Wir sind wieder da” in the daadgalerie new works of Annika Eriksson can be seen at the moment in the exhibitions Squatting/Erinnern, Vergessen, Besetzen at Temporary Kunsthalle, Berlin, and in the exhibition Hey We’re Closed! at the Hayward Gallery, London. Next to recent solo-exhibitions for example at Göteborgs Konstmuseum and at Konstmuseum Malmö and at the Cubitt Gallery, London, Annika Eriksson realized numerous projects and commissions in public space, for example for the Arnolfini in Bristol (2009), for UP Projects in Regent’s Park in London (2008), for Mobile Art Productions and for the Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm (2008), for Platform Garanti in Istanbul (2007) or for IASPIS for the Biennial in Venice in 2005 or for the Dakar Biennial (2008). Eriksson took part in numerous international group shows, recently in „Schazam“ at GerhardsenGerner, Berlin (2010), „Code Share“ at CAC Vilnius (2009), „The Greenroom“ at Bard College, New York (2008) and in the Sheffield Biennale 2008.

For more information:
artpress – Ute Weingarten Tel: +49 (0)30 2196 1843 artpress@uteweingarten.de

Image: Annika Eriksson, Wir sind wieder da, 2010 / © the artist

Opening Friday 14 May, 7 - 9pm

daadgalerie
Zimmerstr. 90/ 91, Berlin
Mon-Sat 11am-6pm

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