Curated by C-print
Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm
With: Seroconversion, Theodor Ander, Carla Garlaschi, Philip Dufva, Karon Nilzén Jonsson and Gethin Wyn Jones
Installation photos: Jean-Baptiste Béranger, courtesy of Wetterling Gallery
Performances by Seroconversion and Princess Prada took place on Nov 16 on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Stockholm
All Disco Dance Must End in Broken Bones, November 6 - December 13
Gethin Wyn Jones You’re a Mystery to Me (2017)
"At its core, my work is concerned with examining commodity aesthetics across a range of representational codes and conventions. From this starting point I have developed an interest in seduction, fetishisation of surface, and advertisement.
Words such as seduction, glossiness, and surface are an important element of my practice. I aim to create work that has a glossy sheen, dripping with gorgeousness. The aesthetics are designed to get people slavering, kept in a state of constant stimulation and anticipation."
Seroconversion, Homotopos II (2018)
"The shape of the sculptures are based on actual public restrooms that could be found in Gothenburg that was used for cruising (men looking for other men to have sex with). The material of clear acrylic glass was chosen partly for describing how ‘private’ practices (of sex and desire) take place in the public and the surveillance of authorities that came with it – but it can also be seen as creating a discrepancy between a tradition of ‘clean’ minimalist sculpture and the bodily, emotionally and ‘filthy’ practices of the spaces that the sculptures represent."
Left: Gethin Wyn Jones, There’s Something They’re Not Telling Us (2017) Right: Seroconversion, Homotopos III (2018)
About Homotopos III: "Noise and queerness can be seen as two kinds of unwantedness in the general public. When connecting a pink noise generator to the urinal with transducers the object itself emanates ideas of noise, disturbance and queer desire. At the same time the sound animates the object and can also bring to mind the sound of flushing water and hissing water pipes. As a sound sculpture the noise of the object is not easily avoided and leaks onto the environment around it."
Theodor Ander, itch, 2019
Carla Garlaschi, Elevate Your Pitch (2019), video still
"Elevate Your Pitch is the title for a backstory of my stage persona, Princess Prada. Think: reggaeton diva on-ice. With Stockholm as backdrop, the city is briefly portrayed as a postcard lacking any sensual interaction. This cold appeal is intended to dislocate the video from usually sweaty ideas of how to interpret the genre. Throughout a monologue, this persona deals with matters such as how one can articulate belonging to a Latinx scene, from the Nordic region. Here, deterritorialization and detachment proportionally escalate with social media filter bubbles. In that way Elevate Your Pitch is to me the impersonation of an overly protected solitaire. The voice-over relates a story of failed togetherness.
Filmed inside an ultra-safe Swedish data bunker, the location served as a tacit mark on the hostile surrounding, be it the self- absorbed European art institutions or the global rise of the far-right. An inner dialogue unfolds, while even safety turns into mockery with the scene of the limousine office. Stillness layers up in that strange peace, proper to double glass isolation. Throughout the editing process, I followed the Chilean social uprise. Getting informed through my friends and colleagues in Santiago and abroad, I wondered, if we could expect a new exile wave of Chilean and Latin American people."
Carla Garlaschi, Elevate Your Pitch (2019), video still
Back: Philip Dufva, Meet Me In the Park (It’s Ok Just Spit) (2018) Front: Karon Nilzén Jonsson, Body and Soul (2017)
"The two works of Meet Me In the park (It’s Ok Just Spit), stem from the cruising parks of Örebro from 1970-1990; the two bodies recreate the body language used by cruisers looking for sex. They gaze at one another, wanting to be seen and searching for a connection, if only for a brief moment. Blending into the background if you don’t know or have the keys to their language."
Center: Karon Nilzén Jonsson, Body and Soul (2017)
It was a place with a view. Just below the forest, just above the sea. I felt my body become one with the soil, my soul one with the wind. Nothing left to worry about. I would stay there forever.
(Karon Nilzén Jonsson)