Utsikten / The prediction
2018
Exhibition at Krognoshuset in Lund,
and in Mellanrummets mekanismer / The mechanisms of the gap together with Tova Fransson presented by Grafikens Hus at Kringlans Konstfönster in Södertälje, curator Ulrika Flink
The works in the exhibition The prediction take further a long-lasting interest in the concept of the nation state. What are the mechanisms and influences on ways to reason that the idea of the nation state have? The prediction handles these issues both in a literal sense by texts distributed as typographical posters, and in the practise of folding lighting filters and using their inherent aspect of changing colours when overlapping. It is abstraction and concretion, and touches prevailing questions of inclusion and exclusion. Who are our sense of solidarity encompassing? The prediction explores if complex structural aspects can be creased formally.
Downstairs a 5,5 meter graphite drawing of the letter i rests on the floor. In Swedish i means ‘in’: a word in it self. i also got other connotations.
Axel Andersson writes about Strand’s working methods: ‘Strand engages with material, mechanics and text in order to explore not the nature but the construction of the figurative and the literal. The turn is both simple and profoundly destabilising. The literal, previously a site for the singular and discrete, inherits the multiplicity and open-endedness of the figurative. The physicality of the material, a key component of these works, is ever so much the end point as the starting one. But no thing is the same after having been conceptually stood on its head. Neither is the figurative speech a new symptom literally materialised. Strand’s art transmits a profound and radical understanding of that each position was always already there in the other.’
Last image show a review from 2018-03-03.
From the press text about The mechanisms of the gap:
Liv Strand’s artistic practice centres round the desire to reshape; in a process that provides a space for something that has not yet fully taken form. Strand is originally from Södertälje and studied at the Royal Institute of Art (1999). Through art the conditions for a collective understanding is explored and negotiated – how it is manifested and how it can disappear. In the exhibition are Strand’s beautifully coloured typographic posters included, where poetic texts twist and turn the foundational construction of the nation state, its inner and outer borders. Strand writes; There is an undefined area for longing / desire / aspirations. It leaks.
Post-truth is described as a symptom of a world where objective facts are no longer the basis of how we gather information or relate to knowledge. Personal beliefs, experience, understanding and feelings create gaps and slippages in relation to objective facts. Truth claims falls flat, power disrupts and new spaces emerge in a configuration of tensions between the concrete and the abstract. Absolute truth was abandoned a long time ago. We now embrace complexity, the uncertainty about truth-claims restrict us to the intermediate, grey zones, structures, contexts, and shifting power relations. How we experience the world is coloured by how we meet, code and process sensory stimulation and information. We interpret and reinterpret in a continual on-going process. Like origami, beautiful hand-folded colour filters are part of the installation of the Art Window. Strand’s work alters the sunlight and creates new colours which overlaps in an on-going process.
Both Fransson and Strand’s use of letterpress printing braces against the tradition, stretching and changing the process by making visible the mechanisms of space, the hand and thought in an on-going continual labour.
