Gunilla Klingberg:
Two new works in Istanbul
8 September – 4 November, 2007
Presented by Iaspis parallel and as
part of the Istanbul Biennial
info [at] iaspis.com
Antrepo No 3, Tophane
(Cosmic Matter)
Urban Café, Kartal Sokak 6/A,
Istiklal Caddesi (Brand New View)
Two new works by Gunilla Klingberg (Stockholm) will be shown parallel, during and as part of the Istanbul Biennial 2007. The installation Cosmic Matter is presented at Antrepo, one of the buildings where the biennial takes place, and the window piece Brand New View at Urban Café, close to Istiklal. Part of Gunilla Klingberg’s project in Istanbul is a publication with texts by Lars Bang Larsen and Adnan Yildiz. The book is published by Propexus as part of Iaspis’ monographic
publication series In Dialogue.
Cosmic Matter
Gunilla Klingberg’s project for the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Cosmic Matter, 2007, is an architecturally hermetic, mixed-media installation with allegorical markers from science and new age culture, reflecting on what could only be described as ‘the outsourcing of the moon’. In late 2006, NASA in collaboration with twelve other space agencies, announced the project The Global Exploration Strategy which includes plans to construct a moon base and, in short, colonize the moon. The NASA & Co. declaration involves selling the moon’s natural resources to private enterprise, which will invalidate the almost thirty year old UN treaty that reaffirms the importance of a strictly peaceful use of the moon, asserting that it should be used solely for the benefit of the international community at large, not an individual actor. In Klingberg’s installation, indexes of the age-old significance of the moon will be juxtaposed with a contemporary logic of ownership, branding and capitalizing of myths, dreams and the collective unconsciousness. Cosmic Matter represents this unholy alliance of the spiritual and the commercial by traditional objects of spirituality as well as by Klingberg’s moon pattern web. The archetypes devour the entire exhibition space and the artist provides us with a premonition of the unfettered (ir)rational logic of human expansion into outer space.
Brand New View
In a separate venue, Gunilla Klingberg will show the window piece Brand New View, which is loosely linked to the ideas in her installation Cosmic Matter. The work is a geometrical kaleidoscopic pattern, consisting of logotypes from cut-price supermarket stores and mundane grocery brands. The work reflects on the collective unconscious, the daily rhythm and rituals of commonplace actions, as well as meditation images.
Gunilla Klingberg works with cosmic and commercial substances. Her work mainly consists of mixed-media installations, including: sound, lights, wallpaper and other objects. Klingberg’s installations aim to extract the spiritual as well as the mundane out of bits and pieces from spheres as diverse as advertising, supermarkets and Buddhist iconography. Her installations, which always take familiar objects into play, outline consumerism 2.0, with its new rapid development that includes strategies of shaping identities and vernacular marketing. All this becomes architecture, sculpture and graphic art in Klingberg’s system of thought. Born in 1966 in Stockholm where she currently lives and works, Klingberg has a background in both art and graphic design. She has exhibited at, among others, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Kiasma (Helsinki), Busan Biennial (Busan), and Moderna Museet (Stockholm). www.gunillaklingberg.com
For more information:
Iaspis
Maria Skolgata 83
SE-118 53 Stockholm
Sweden
+46 (0)8 50655077
info@iaspis.com