Monday, November 17, 2008

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Monday, September 8, 2008

Patrik Aarnivaara



This and that, now and then but not in between, 2008
Sculpture / installation
Black & white laser print on paper (29,7 x 120 cm), cutouts from magazines and
Lambda prints (20 x 26,7 cm) in nylon pockets, black & white laser transparency
film, chipboard and wood beams; 120 × 140 × 90 × 80 cm.

Further information: www.aarnivaara.com

Ana Bezelga

Unhomely #1
2008
Sculpture
Aluminium
200 x 200 x 80 cm



Unhomely #2
2008
Sculpture
Galvanized Aluminium

Soft PVC Transparent Film, Light Blue
250 x 250 x 130 cm


"The image of the house has always been used to talk about the expansive, mimetic nature of the novel; but in Biswas you have a form of realism that is unable to contain the anguish of cultural displacement and diasporic movement. Although the unhomely is a paradigmatic postcolonial experience, it has a resonance that can be heard distinctly, it erratically, in fictions that negociate the powers of cultural difference in a range of historical conditions and social contradictions."

Homi K. Bhabha in The World and the Home


Maria Lusitano



video, 22 minutos, cor, som

To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. Homi bhabba.

In 2007 I moved to Sweden with my family. But Sweden had existed abstractly inside of me for a long time, as a childhood dream space. A place where I felt "at home".

Moving with a family to a new country, had a all new set of implications, quite diferent from the international artist that "nomadates" around the world. With a family, quickly one assumed, for itself, and for the others, the condition of emigrant, with all its everyday life dilemas of finding jobs, schools, a place to stay. And the psychological dilemmas of being accepted.And where to fit.

One year after, in a video half between video essay and documentary, I reflect and make a balance about that new condition of myself and so many around me: The identity of the foreigner. And what type of processes one would have to make to feel at home , not being there?

Rui Mourão




The buildings in my neighbourhood don't have doorbells, buzzers 

or intercom systems. Instead they have a keypad. 

Only those people who know the security code can enter. 

However, all the buildings have inner courtyards. 

Those courtyards are big spaces, safe from the outside street. 

They are surrounded on all sides by hundreds of back windows. 

My bedroom window faces one of those courtyards. 

Whenever I am in my bedroom and I look out the window, 

I see my neighbour's windows. 

My neighbours and I don't have curtains, so I can see and be seen. 

The situation seems like a kind of panopticon, but it functions in the 

opposite way that the panoptical system, conceived for prisons, does. 

Here, there is not a dominant authority looking at and controlling all. 

Instead, each individual produces a gaze and, at the same time, 

a gaze that is produced by everyone and by no one.

The main function of these courtyards seems to be the development 

of relational and shared activities. 

My courtyard has a community garden complete with tables, chairs, 

and even a grill. 

There is also a community garbage and recycling spot, 

a community bicycle-parking area and a community laundry. 

Thus, it is a public space for a private community. 

It is a space conceived to create a sense of collectivity 

among individuals. 

It is a space divided by fences and walls, often empty of people.


Community courtyard, 2007 / 2008
Photography and text
Series of photos in double slide projection; dimensions variable
Lightbox (with 1 photo and a text), digital print on acrylic, alluminium
and fluorescent lamps; 180 x 61 x 10 cm

Eivind Nesterud



Table for ideal setting, 2008
2 drawings
Pen and pencil on paper; A3

Anne Marte Overaa



Evil House
Digital Photo.



Home
20 envelopes printed with all my adresses since i was born.



Projection
Video
Cuddling hands projected in a bucket of white housepaint.
White paint to make a new beginning.

www.annemarteoveraa.se

Artur Moreira



Urbe, 2008
Installation
Cardboard, mdf, wood, paper, paint, glue; dimensions variable

Shirin Sabahi



BO01ers (Collaboration with Citizens of “City of Tomorrow”), 2008
Photography and text
Series of posters, digital print on paper; 100 x 75 cm and 75 x 50 cm

Hans Scherer



One Over Another, 2008
3 sculptures
Wood, paint; dimensions variable

Isabel Simões



O outro quarto #1, 2008
Painting
Acrylic paint and Indian ink on canvas; 150 x 190 cm

Jakob Simonson



Untitled (Arrival), 2007 / 2008
Installation
Vinyl paint, mdf, wood, glass mirrors, table; dimensions variable

Fredrik Værslev



Modern living, 2007
Photography
2 posters, digital print on paper; 70 x 100 cm

Monday, September 1, 2008

THE HOUSE AND THE WORLD  

The House  

The real estate crisis that has been widely covered by television news programmes 

has stripped bare one of the myths of modern capitalism, the possibility of basing 

the idea of one’s own house on the ephemeral notion of credit, an idea that 

absorbs the dreams of all those who, like youths and emigrants, seek to define 

a place in society. 

However, the roots of this phenomenon can be found in a more profound 

dimension. The binomial own-ownership, which is contained in the idea of one’s 

own house, is at the heart of Western thought, as has been progressively defined 

by modern rationality1. To a certain extent, modernity has been based on a political 

and juridical effort to ensure the rights of individuals over themselves and over 

space, making it indispensable that this be measurable and classifiable. Thus, 

the difficulty in dealing with phenomena like madness, which jeopardised the 

individual’s autonomy, or crime, which was an attempt against property, is not 

surprising. Just as it is no surprise that the first major criticisms of modernity 

were aimed at the idea of own (Freud) and ownership (Marx).  


The World 



The House and the World  

In contemporary times the notion of own, an autonomous, closed and hierarchised 

essence, has dissolved. At the same time, categories that were believed to be 

easily charted, such as that of space, have lost their limits. Against this backdrop, 

the idea of a house, as an incision in time that inscribes humans in the continuum 

of nature, can now be questioned. It was this question mark that induced a set 

of Portuguese and Scandinavian artists, or artists living in Scandinavia, to come 

together in this exhibition project5. 


Politics 


Construction has always assumed a political dimension both on account of the

resources that it implies as well as due to the mark that it imposes on common

spaces. However, the discarding of ideologies, that so characterises our times,

allows us a privileged perception of the ways in which architecture and urbanism

served propaganda purposes and assumed ideological expressions.

This is the case of the proposal by Patrick Aarnivaara, who assumes the traumas

of a post-ideological age, later drawing attention retrospectively to the political

conditioning about architectural options while denouncing the symbolic vacuum

created by the present transformation of ethical values into market values.

The possibility of creating a world, inherent to Utopia, is present in the installation

by Artur Moreira. However, his work contains an element of ambiguity, clearly not

utopian, both owing to the absence of gravity in the horizontal/vertical inversion

as well as because it sustains an undefined temporality.

The house, and architecture in general, contains a less explicit political dimension

in the tensions generated around ownership as a principle of exclusion (the

homeless).

The house, and architecture in general, also serve to reconsider other categories

such as a sense of individuality, belonging, absence (temporary or definitive) or

exclusion.

Ana Bezelga evokes the meaning of unhomely Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) in

her work. The house, understood as a place of the self - of establishing an

individual in an identity, in a rigid structure, whether it is familiar or national - is

questioned by means of the strangeness caused by a permanent dislocation,

where contamination by the other becomes inevitable. A liminal zone is thus

generated, in which a sense of belonging is lost in the permanent transformation

between the inside and the outside, the public and the private, the house and the

world.

Maria Lusitano reflects on the relationship between the phenomenon of 

emigration and the idea of a home6. By definition, emigration implies dislocation, 

leaving a place, in contrast to the idea of a house that is associated with stability 

and specificity. Between these two extremes one can find identities being 

rewritten, a story of growing closer to the new place, expressed in this context 

via a personal narrative. 

The work of Shirin Sabahi, associated with the Swedish project entitled the “City 

of the Future” in Malmö, describes the (im)possibility of nowadays conceiving 

architecture and urbanism on the basis of a utopian perspective. In the midst 

of tensions generated between the seclusion of the private and the voyeurism 

of the public and the publicised, the notion of ownership appears here not just 

as a principle of exclusion (distance from the other) but also of auto-exclusion 

(distancing the self with regard to the other).   


Private 

The notion of property has political implications (the principle of exclusion) but 

likewise highlights the role of the house as a space par excellence of a private 

(familiar) world. This is where the links between individual and public spaces, 

between architecture and urbanism, are situated. Links that have become 

increasingly complex in a world where securitarism, caused by the urgency of 

pushing away the other, combines with a virtual and intrusive voyeurism.  

The work of Rui Mourão has a strong contextual component, in which the artist’s 

personal experience combines with a sociological dimension. By presenting 

images of a restricted community area (where the artist lived), Mourão draws 

attention towards the difficult management of the public and the private and 

highlights the tenuous boundaries between security and freedom, exclusion and 

sharing, seeing and being seen.  

The house, as a private, familiar place, is a space for recognition, one that 

delimits identities. But it is also the first place for the tensions and schisms 

through which the subject is (de)constructed.  

By presenting twenty envelopes with the addresses of all the houses where she 

has lived, Anne Marte Overaa recalls, in formal terms, minimal and conceptual 

proposals. However, she subverts this heritage by means of a highly emotional 

content. The house appears as a place to construct the subject. However, this 

construction does not correspond to a linear process. On the contrary, it is based 

on diverse tensions: between presence and absence; between the possibility and 

impossibility of communication.  

Isabel Simões reflects both about the house as well as her own painting. In 

both cases the subject’s relationship with the world, based phenomenologically 

on a corporised perception, is questioned via schisms between recognition and 

difference, real and represented, visible and hidden.  

Jakob Simonson sets out from the novel “The Castle” to work on questions 

related to space, visuality, memory and narratives. This is not a direct citation 

but instead evokes the way in which the Kafkaesque universe is constructed. 

The potential narrative invites the beholder to inhabit this world but merely to 

compare it with the absence of the place itself (understood as an organising 

origin or principle). 

Liminal 

The way in which post-media postures - which value a generalised mix in an 

expanded field – have occupied the place that modernist intransigence reserved 

for the specific essence of each art, particularly questions architecture, which, 

over the centuries, has incorporated other art forms such as painting and 

sculpture in a controlled and stratified manner.  

Fredrik Varslev presents two posters with 86 views of architecture that capture 

the supposed view of a graffiti artist of urban space. The artist cites modernism 

– manipulating the photographs to make them closer to modernist paintings 

– while simultaneously eliminating boundaries – between each specific art; 

between high and low culture – through an approximation between an artistic 

space and a living space.  

The design of a table presented by Eivind Nesterud expounds upon questions 

brought by design to the world of art, crossing the single with the multiple, the 

tall with the short. It simultaneously reinterprets and sublimes the notion of 

object and authorship.  

The work of Hans Scherer explores the conceptual frontiers between the notions 

of space and movement or, more precisely, the way in which space - based on 

directional vectors and variables of time - implies movement and, consequently, 

the subject and the subject’s body. To a certain extent, it is the ephemeral nature 

of the contemporary landscape itself, with its (re)configurations, alternations 

and mutations, which is evident here. 

* * * 

The conjugation of the diverse proposals that comprise this exhibition 

demonstrates that the binomial own-ownership is no longer enough when 

thinking about the idea of a house. We are faced with a polysemic condition – 

which is reflected in the title of the exhibition – as opposed to the dogmatism of 

a rationalist heritage and the teleological idealism of utopias. The house, as a 

place that contains the plural possibility of diverse spaces and meanings, unveils 

its heterotopia . 

Lisbon, September 2008 

Ivo André Braz 

Israel Guarda


At one extreme of modernity one finds the idea of the vanguard. One of the 

decisive questions for vanguardism was precisely that of space. However, the 

topos that was defined here was preceded by a prefix of negation. The term 

vanguard implied a criticism and even a rupture with the existing order of things. 

Its space was the non-place of utopia. Hence the strong ideological weight of 

vanguardist projects and their dangerous proximity to totalitarian proposals2. 

The belief in the transformation of ethics by aesthetics was also a belief in the 

possibility of being able to expand the non-place until it occupied all existing 

space3. 

About a hundred years after the appearance of the first artistic vanguardists, 

one of the ironies of history is that it was a late-capitalist society that absorbed 

and realised vanguardist aspirations in an overall expansion of the aesthetic 

dimension. But it did so by inverting its presuppositions. The ideological 

dimension evaporated before the flashy banality of effigies and the virtuality of 

the spectacle4. Simultaneously, the generalised macroscopy tends to dissolve 

the question of space, eliminating the boundaries that structured it, albeit its 

inherent tensions were still to be solved. 

Sade’s preoccupation with subverting both categories, until the implosion of the ownership of one’s own body, reflects the importance     

that this binomial has assumed for modern people.  

Adorno’s famous phrase about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz echoes not just the clash with the unnameable but 

also the emptying of utopia before the promiscuity between culture and barbarity.   

Wassily Kandinsky. Do Espiritual na Arte (1911). Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1999. 

Guy Debord, A sociedade do espectáculo (1967), Lisbon: Ed. Mobilis in mobile, 1991 cf. Jean Baudrillard, A Troca Simbólica e a Morte 

(1976), Lisbon, Ed. 70, 1996.

Construction has always assumed a political dimension both on account of the 

resources that it implies as well as due to the mark that it imposes on common 

spaces. However, the discarding of ideologies, that so characterises our times, 

allows us a privileged perception of the ways in which architecture and urbanism 

served propaganda purposes and assumed ideological expressions.  

This is the case of the proposal by Patrick Aarnivaara, who assumes the traumas 

of a post-ideological age, later drawing attention retrospectively to the political 

conditioning about architectural options while denouncing the symbolic vacuum 

created by the present transformation of ethical values into market values.   

The possibility of creating a world, inherent to Utopia, is present in the installation 

by Artur Moreira. However, his work contains an element of ambiguity, clearly not 

utopian, both owing to the absence of gravity in the horizontal/vertical inversion 

as well as because it sustains an undefined temporality.  

The house, and architecture in general, contains a less explicit political dimension 

in the tensions generated around ownership as a principle of exclusion (the 

homeless). 

The house, and architecture in general, also serve to reconsider other categories 

such as a sense of individuality, belonging, absence (temporary or definitive) or 

exclusion.    

Ana Bezelga evokes the meaning of unhomely Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) in 

her work. The house, understood as a place of the self - of establishing an 

individual in an identity, in a rigid structure, whether it is familiar or national - is 

questioned by means of the strangeness caused by a permanent dislocation, 

where contamination by the other becomes inevitable. A liminal zone is thus 

generated, in which a sense of belonging is lost in the permanent transformation 

between the inside and the outside, the public and the private, the house and the 

world. 

It was, above all, affective affinities that brought some of these artists together in the city of Malmö, like a crease across the map of 

Europe, indifferent to bureaucratic aspirations to unify the continent. This meeting resulted in a place of dialogue, which was expressed 

in exhibitions both in Portugal as well as in Scandinavian countries, with dynamics that are not indifferent to the contemporary 

modalities of space.  

The artist is presently living in Malmö in Sweden, experiencing first-hand the condition of being an emigrant.