Outside in / Curated by Jeanette Gunnarsson
Participating artists: Ingrid Segrind, Klara Zetterholm, Mary Furniss, White Noise Dada, Henrik Stenberg, Mahadi Haidar, Sara Sjöbäck
10 June - 23 July 2022
Coulisse Gallery
Sigtunagatan 15
113 22 Stockholm
Participating artists: Ingrid Segrind, Klara Zetterholm, Mary Furniss, White Noise Dada, Henrik Stenberg, Mahadi Haidar, Sara Sjöbäck
10 June - 23 July 2022
Coulisse Gallery
Sigtunagatan 15
113 22 Stockholm
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Exploring contemporary perspectives on the natural world, 'Outside-In' presents work investigating the influence and relationship between ecologies and creative practice, considering how we bring nature into our ever-expanding urbanised environments and consciousness. The age of the Anthropocene and its undeniable impact on our climate and ecosystems means that we continuously process and realise the earth's power and vulnerability. Here, the artists position us on a journey of resonance and connection in a space between reality and apocalyptical fiction, through wordless narratives, surrealist landscapes, and queer ecological myth-making.
Klara Zetterholm’s sculptural practice focuses on fakes and facsimiles, imagining what cultural history and archeology could look like through an anachronistic and futuristic lens. Placed in an ambivalent parallel time and centered around an imaginative position, the work is situated between the apocalyptic and sci-fi. When thinking about histories, Zetterholm considers skepticism and speculation to be a more exciting entry point than facts and certainty. By faking and forging, she creates a form of caricature, a dishonest depiction of something made better or worse, while also focusing on the essence of an object. By removing a straightforward historical reading of the works and using the approach of a caricaturist, the objects created have another more essential quality to them. Deceptive and uncanny, the works allow horror, parody and beauty to meet.
Ingrid Segring’s graphite drawings are a refuge into a nostalgic, calm and quite gloomy world, oscillating between the recognised and the unknown. An almost familiar story leaks through the seams as emotions about past and future emerge through wordless narratives. In her intuitive process, focusing on material translations and transformations, she explores how boundaries dissolve and blend when things meet and become part of a communal story. By bringing in both sculptural and painterly expressions, Segring plays with the potential of the material and its conceptual possibilities, presenting the viewer with a space of contemplation and quiet nostalgic remembrance.
Mahadi Haidar is a versatile ceramicist who manipulates his material and craft to meet new and unexpected forms that might not normally be associated with traditional ceramic sculpture. Bold and experimental, Mahadi's work is not afraid to change expressions and challenge audiences by doing the opposite of what is expected. The works in this exhibition represent a further departure for the artist as he pushed his experimentation with his medium even further. Mahdi's versatile production moves freely between contemporary art and ceramic design taking his medium in unexpected directions.
Henrik Stenberg’s paintings seek an encounter with the grandeur of nature and the smallness of man in the face of vast and uncontrolled wilderness, immensely powerful and yet vulnerable to the threat of human destruction. Depicting towering barren and rocky mountains, contrasted with white snow-capped peaks and watery streams and cloudy skies, the works originate from Stenberg's imagination. In this way they become a pure cultural product, an interesting contradiction to the natural world they represent. Stenberg takes a surrealist approach to begin his works, creating automated drawings that emerge from his subconscious, letting chance show different possibilities. He then paints towards greater and greater clarity; rocks are chiseled out and stone is laid until a place is created that somehow feels real. Stenberg is interested in finding paths through the landscape and mountain ranges he creates and investigates how natural habitats change with higher altitudes. The mountain has something reverent and animated about its landscape, its upward striving bringing to mind altarpieces or portraits. An enchanting landscape. Rippling streams rush forward. The snow melts but it melts very quickly. No one escapes in these times. A reminder of the vulnerability of the powerful.
Sara Sjöbäck work often originates from an autobiographical perspective and the observation of movement in the public sphere. She works freely in material with an attraction to the public sphere and heavy industry. Often in combinations with light she sculpts the hard materials into objects that stand alone or are part of a site-specific installation. Sjöbäck’s work has been exhibited at Liljevalchs, Stockholms Auktionsverk (Stockholm auction house), Institute Suedoise in Paris, The Swedish embassy in Copenhagen, Nordiska Galleriet and Copenhagen Fashion Week.
Mary Furniss creates intricate ink drawings, presented in upcycled wooden frames made from canvas stretchers, part of their ongoing project and graphic novel 'After Pandora'. The frames echo the structures of a religious shrine, giving the works a sense of holy reverence and timeless importance. Set in the future of a blackened Earth, we follow a black nihilist on their journey through a space and time that is endless and indiscernible. Inspired by the theories of permaculture, Furniss's works tell the story of a protagonist longing to reverse 'the blackening of the green', a process in which toxicity has taken over and left earth devoid of a healthy ecosystem. They search for a way to re- integrate land, resources and the environment, reversing toxic waste into a new ecology.
WhiteNoiseDADA is a collaboration between the two designers Klaas Kuiken and Charley Reijnders. Their work is young, fresh, adolescent and socially engaged.
Based on the Punk and Dadaistic movement their absurdist and provocative attitude creates a new way of designing. With humor they battle fixed truth systems and create a new design language. Started in 2019 and based in Arnhem they plan to take over the world.
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