Leonor Antunes: Discrepancies with G.G. / Ylva Westerlund: The New Hird / Mariana Silva : The Annotated Friends of Interpretable Objects

Discrepancies with G.G. by Leonor Antunes
The minimalist and yet sensual installations of Leonor Antunes reveal traces of twentieth-century modernist architecture as well as how materials move across the world. At the same time, the installations activate the space and act as tactile and evocative encounters between the architectural memory and craft history of certain places and patterns of movement.

The show at Tensta konsthall is informed by the work of Swedish designer and architect Greta Magnusson-Grossman (1906–99), for example, her 1959 Villa Sundin in the Northern town of Hudiksvall. In 1933, Magnusson-Grossman was the first woman ever to win the Furniture Design award from the Swedish Society of Industrial Design. Seven years later, she moved to Los Angeles and set up a new studio focusing on lighting and slender furniture with unusual combinations of materials. In addition to making interiors for Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, she designed numerous villas, combining features connected to Southern Californian lifestyles and European modernism.

In the exhibition, the notion of “acrotony” is featuring. It is the tendency of most trees and plants to give nutritional priority to the lateral shoots nearest the apex of the main shoot. The plants, like many of the other materials in Antunes’ work, come from far away places like South Africa, the Antilles, and mountainous areas in South Asia. None of the elements is functional in the sense of furniture; instead, a new kind of object is created. The title Discrepancies with… both nods to some modernist architects and designers and marks a difference from them.

The New Hird by Ylva Westerlund
As a part of Tensta Museum Continues

Borderlands, the future, and the relationship between the countryside and the suburb are the focus of artist Ylva Westerlund’s watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings in the Tensta gallery entrance. The images depict depopulated environments in and around a paper mill community in the north of Sweden and a well-known suburb and the nearby green areas of the Järva Field, where her studio is located. The surrounding landscape composes the background for some of the drawings. Others contain creatures that could be the beginning of a different band establishing contact with a changed landscape.

Growing up in a small industrial community in the north and living in Tensta, which has come to be Westerlund’s home and workplace, the artist has developed a distinctly singular view of her surroundings. At first glance, the images appear dystopian, but in Westerlund’s narrative, the catastrophe seems to have the potential to ignite positive change, sparking the growth of other perspectives and new ideas.

The online platform Space will present The Annotated Friends of Interpretable Objects by Mariana Silva. Initially two video works are included in the exhibition: First Digitalizations of Specimens from Nature and First Digitalizations of Museological Artefacts, which deal with how the relationship between nature and culture is comprehended. Also questioned are the mechanisms framing the historical borders between objecthood and personhood. Crucial are questions concerning how digitalization distorts ideas about ownership in relation to the acquisition of main attractions in museum collections that are colored by circumstances now viewed in terms of colonial encroachment.

Tensta konsthall keeps open during the summer with the drop-in Art Porch, lectures, guided tours of the exhibitions, City Walks, and Art Camps for youths. Citizen to Citizen, an initiative for newly arrived migrants who need support and knowledge of society in Sweden, takes place every Tuesday, and a language café is organized as part of The Silent University, initiated by the artist Ahmet Öğüt.

For press enquiries, please contact:
Asrin Haidari
asrin [​at​] tenstakonsthall.se / T +46 (0) 70 454 7898