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2/2/2007

Elisabet Apelmo and Marit Lindberg

Landskrona Kunsthalle, Landskrona

Marked, unmarked. Video, sound and exercise

Elisabet Apelmo and Marit Lindberg

Elisabet Apelmo uses photography, video, sound and drawing in her works to explore power, identity, the body and sexuality. Apelmo also holds a master’s degree in sociology. Marit Lindberg’s works in video are based on stories, collective memories and language gaps. The point of intersection in the two artists’ work is the absorption with narrative and the shift between the documentary and the fictional. They also share an interest in women’s soccer, Apelmo from a sociological perspective and Lindberg as the parent of a girl who is a serious player of the game. Marked, unmarked

Landskrona Konsthall was designed in 1963 by architects Sten Samuelsson and Fritz Jaenecke. The austere architecture in concrete and glass is considered one of the best examples of Swedish modernism. The park is present everywhere in the museum: around the building, inside in the atrium and in between, captured in the reflections in the glass. The park is part of the public urban space, but for whom is it public and at what hours of the day? The resonant base of the work is men’s violence against women, in both private and public settings. Cultural geographer Birgitta Andersson describes the violence as a continuum from verbal insult to rape, where the less serious offenses serve to remind the woman of the threat of rape. In response to the threat of victimization, women calculate their risks to avoid violence, which in turn leads to spatial limitations. The risk assessment is often such an obvious part of womanhood that it is not verbalized. But the artists are not intereste d in reproducing the stereotypical picture of the frightened and defenseless woman. Where power is exercised, there is always potential for resistance and the focus of the exhibition is this power/counter power.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu believes that the female existence is constituted through male superordination as a perceived object, an object for others to look at. The negative collective expectations of women’s physical ability tends to become part of the body, expressed as permanent states of affairs. Bourdieu discusses sports as a means of changing these states. Intensive practice of sports “leads to a profound transformation of the subjective and objective experience of the body. [...] It [the body] is no longer merely a thing that is made to be looked at or which one has to look at in order to prepare it to be looked at. Instead of being a body for others it becomes a body for oneself; the passive body becomes an active and acting body” writes Bourdieu. Through the practice of sports, the passive and objectified woman becomes an active, and de facto stronger, subject. Sports may also function as one form of resistance against traditional femininity, wherein the risk of be ing the victim of male violence seems to be an accepted ingredient.

Karate is a concrete form of resistance, a martial art of self-defense. Can soccer be used as a more complex picture of resistance? Even though it is the most popular sport among women in Sweden, women soccer players are paradoxically enough considered unfeminine, mannish, or lesbian. The strength, speed, fearlessness and aggression it takes to be a good soccer player do not coincide with either traditional femininity or the image of woman as victim.

A group of women karateka, two women’s soccer teams, a male choir and two young musicians from Landskrona are involved in the exhibition. Shadow pictures of the women athletes in training are projected on the museum’s glass façade. The singers in the male choir are dressed in sports jerseys. They represent the male coaches, fathers, or boyfriends standing alongside the field.

Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall

Marked, unmarked is the first of three exhibitions in Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall, a joint project of Kultur Skaring;ne and the municipality of Landskrona. A catalogue documenting the working processes surrounding the exhibition will be published in September 2007.

Landskrona Kunsthalle
Slottsgatan - Landskrona
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 13-18, closed Mondays

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