University of Gothenburg, School of Photography: Graduation exhibition

Den sammanlagda längden
December 4, 2009 – January 3, 2010

CHRISTEL BROST, MICHAEL GRENMARKER, ÅSA MILLHOLM, JAKOB SJÖSTEDT, HENRIK SUNDBLAD and SIGNE VAD

Göteborgs Konsthall, Götaplatsen, Göteborg, Sweden

http://www.konsthallen.goteborg.se

During the last two years, under the guidance of professor Annika von Hausswolff and professor Lotta Antonsson, the master students of the School of photography, University of Gothenburg, have developed their work in many directions and in different medias, but at the same time, they share the same aestetic foundation.

CHRISTEL BROST
Phototherapy, as created by Jo Spence, has become my survival technique, an aesthetic displacement of pain. My aim is to analyze the aesthetic displacement that occurs in the passage from the private experience to the public. What forms do such a public “confession” of private experience take, and what symbolic structures are employed in order to convey them?

MICHAEL GRENMARKER
“The distant cloudbreaks. Sometimes I see him on the roads, just walkin´ around.”

ÅSA MILLHOLM
Being an artist keeps me alive, kills the routine of the everyday and revive my spirit.

Thereby stopping me from getting old ahead of time.

JAKOB SJÖSTEDT
I am interested in the movement, what happens from the point when I start doing something and what follows. My work is primary about its own creation, which in a way is documented in the work itself, in the material.

In that sense, you can say that it´s tied to it´s specific space and context, both socially and and in the architecture.

I usually work with everyday materials as cardboard, paper, wood and plaster.
The starting point is often a basic geometric form, or a vague architectural or art historical reference, that in turn raises new ideas and physical fragments, like a chain reaction.

Every time I realize an exhibition, I also have to rework its formal qualities, by trying to tune my spatial awareness, and in a way communicate with the architectural environment and its specific history.

The landscape is never a permanent state, nor is my art. It´s always changing, in a continuing slow movement.

HENRIK SUNDBLAD
This work has been exhibited several times and is an ongoing process of matching different parallell forms of visual representation. It takes on a different form and structure each time. The installation consists of photo documents of spacial interventions made by the artist, short narrative pieces of text and everyday materials such as ordinary flooring, panels, upholstery etc,. The work is ultimatly about the dark and tortuous history and politics of the humanly created lebensraum and the human collective’s unconscious urge to rebelliously carv in their identity to the very fabric of their spacial surroundings.

SIGNE VAD
She has her head under the carpet, without any consequence but with experience

It is the gaps that interests me, the film is looping caught in the same act. In the decision you phase out the past, to begin dealing with what the future has to offer, a sentence I found in a book about Hannah Arendt. The camera trigger symbolizes the moment by materializing the decision; to decide, release and create an image. In one of my series I have compared this choice with the the choices we make in life, in our everyday life. These decisions are not without consequence, neither for ourself or our surroundings. I become encouraged and find hope reading Arendt, because she gives us the initiative and thereby also the possibility to act. From under the carpet I decide my next move.