Ida Idaida, Fathia Mohidin

Bonniers Konsthall announces Ida Idaida and Fathia Mohidin as this year’s recipients of the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation grant. Since its inception in 1985, the foundation has awarded grants to young Swedish artists as a way to encourage and support them in their work. When Bonniers Konsthall first opened its doors in 2006, an annual exhibition with the recipients became an important part of the grant. This year, for the first time, the exhibition will expand in scale and the winners’ work will encompass nearly the entire konsthall. To create space and extend the support to young artists in and around our community we see as particularly urgent at this moment when the corona pandemic has put art and artistic expression everywhere in a state of crisis.

The grant recipient exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall means that vastly different artistic practices can come to share the same space. Unexpected encounters may occur, as well as exciting dialogues between artists’ works, styles and themes. This year’s recipients share common interests in machinery, the body and a recurrent state. They play with an industrial aesthetic where rhythmic and repetitive sounds from machines and moving bodies are interwoven and repeated. At Bonniers Konsthall, both artists seize the space and transform it; one into a place for the unconscious mind, trauma and horror, and the other into a place for exercise, performance and labour.

Ida Idaida (b. 1990) often works with advanced, large-scale sculptural machinery that she establishes like wraiths in the exhibition space. Her work is a way to transfer corporeal experiences, energies and processes in other objects and thus let them convert the energy once more. The works become a way to materialise inner, hidden processes into new observable cycles. The work Truth is not delivered whole but received in parts a rotten corpse flesh slushed acid rain burn the scars embodies inherited suffering, that is transferred through genetics and cloned from one generation to the next. The visitor is encouraged to step into the installation and participate in this distorted world with its own automated lifecycle for flies. 

Fathia Mohidin (b. 1985) focuses on labour and exercise as her point of departure for considerations about the body. In the exhibition she presents spatial installations where the machine is hidden to the eye, but if you listen carefully it will gradually appear: rhythmic and ambivalent sounds from machines at work or physical activity. Mohidin’s works derive from physical research where she, putting her own body through physical stress, investigates notions of work, performance and the gym as a place for commodification (the process by which a person is transformed into a product). What does exhaustion sound like? The installations are often sound- or smell-based, like the rubber matting covering the entire floor of one of the exhibition halls, the strong smell forcing the eye to make way for other senses.

The exhibition will only be open to a limited amount of pre-booked visitors following the guidelines from the Swedish Public Health Department. A digital guided tour of the exhibition will soon be available on bonnierskonsthall.se

Read more about The Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation here.