My Very Own Abyssal Archetype
- C-print
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Presented on two floors, My Very Own Abyssal Archetype is curator Ruby Henderson-Leconte’s
musing on the mermaid as a notion at Parallel Collective Gallery in Stockholm. The exhibition brings together the works of artists Anna Nordström, Anna Ofelia Johansson, and Sigrid Lerche to rethink the mermaid, aesthetically and conceptually. ”Across textile, moving image, sculpture, and performance, the myth refracts its own history, finding new forms and evocative meanings in the contemporary condition” she suggests.
C-P: I love the exhibition title! What are the thoughts around the title in relation to the exhibition scope, placing the notion of the mermaid at the fore?
R.H-L: Thank you! The starting point for the title was this idea of the mermaid as a universal archetype, an instinctual symbol that exists deep in the collective unconscious. Most cultures around the globe share some kind of notion of a half-fish, half-human form, and I find that really intriguing. So there is also a little humour in the insertion of subjectivity, or "my very own", into something so universal.
C-P: What has your own "rapport" with mermaids been like prior to the exhibition?
R.H-L: I took a long hiatus from thinking about mermaids after about age 8! But I returned to them last year in my master's thesis, which looked at how the mermaid has been employed as a conceptual tool in various contemporary artistic practices. Emilija Škarnulytė, Agnes Questionmark, and Mrs. D. Yunupingu are some wonderful artists who use it to think about gender, ecological crisis, hybridity, and so on. I was then motivated to bring together some more local artistic voices around the same ideas and see what emerged.
C-P: What's a thing or two you are hoping visitors will come to think relating to the intellectual universe of mermaids?
R.H-L: Perhaps that the mermaid is not simply a static figure or concept, but rather something that evolves with the times and keeps reinventing itself in the contemporary. Pervasive myths seem to come back to us time and time again, and in doing so, offer new ways to reflect on the present.
C-P: What can you tell us about what you and the artists have chosen to present in the two gallery rooms?
R.H-L: The show essentially presents three different musings on the mermaid across two floors. In the upstairs gallery, Anna Ofelia Johansson and Anna Nordström rethink the figure, aesthetically and conceptually, into the present. Johansson has been working under the persona Mermaids and opened the show with a live sound work that blended aquatic sounds with kitschy DJ aesthetics. Her mermaid boots and shell-phones remain in the gallery following the performance, alongside an animated still that posits other possible virtual renditions of the human-fish figure. Nordström's two new pieces come out of a process of researching, quilting, collecting, and assembling, as a way of getting closer to life in the abyss and tracing her own contemporary mermaid mythology. Then, beckoning you to the downstairs gallery, is Sigrid Lerche's ethereal cover of Britney Spears' coming-of-age hit Slave 4 U. In this video work, the tropes of classical siren mythology return to us in a pop cultural context.
C-P: On that note, what brought you to this specific venue to be the site of this exhibition, Parallel Collective Gallery?
R.H-L: Throughout the past two years that I've lived in Stockholm, Parallel Collective Gallery has felt like an exciting reaction to an otherwise very glossy art scene. It's there that I've encountered so many young artists, fun exhibitions, and diverse cultural initiatives. Given this show's whimsical combination of light-hearted aesthetics and theoretical undertones, it made sense to me to reach out to them with this project in mind.
Ashik Zaman
Ruby Henderson-Leconte’s exhibition is a degree project within the Curating Art, International Master’s Programme at Stockholm University, for which Ashik Zaman was a supervisor.