Du skulle varit där//You had to be there – Nils Svensk

On March 18th 2020 the title of this exhibition: Where You Stand, took on a radically new meaning. The closure of HDK-Valand’s campus stopped us in our tracks (1). Two weeks away from opening, an exhibition of new work by students. In a temporary exhibition space, that we’d never used before, we were due to present a body of work speaking to and of this place, developed specifically for this site and context.

Absence, distance and transference, have become important points of departure for this iteration of a biennial collaboration that intends to engage with the site specific. Here, as with so many exhibitions this spring, the rug has been swept from under our feet yet the 2020 BFA 1 of HDK-Valand has remained standing. The shared experiences of presence can perhaps be turned into an experience of sharing at a distance. Like everyone else in the world we have had to adapt to the times.

“ You get what you want
When you just
Want what you get” (2)

Our adaptation, or part of it, is now in front of you. It is an exhibition, on paper or a screen. Instead of inviting you into our exhibition space, this has been sent to you, in one way or another. To where you stand.

Where we should have been, the specific site: Gislaved, the municipality and town. The history and present of the place is the point of departure from which further research undertaken, tied this exhibition into the fabric of the community. Works that speak to and of its particularities, creating new meanings and illuminating old ones. The work was intended to ‘take place’ and the exhibition to become one, a shared place and experience
— You had to be there.

The exhibition space that was selected is a disused part of the old rubber factory. It is at the centre of Gislaved’s industrial history, situated at the shore of the river Nissan which runs through the town, and through many of the works in this exhibition, still powering the industry. The space is vast, several rooms that have been emptied but not renovated. This space is now used, only by a group of local artists, Konst:fabriken, who fill the space with a wonderful exhibition, a kind of art fair once a year (3). The surrounding building, a factory complex several times the size of the exhibition space, still houses the rubber factory, Gislaveds Gummi, as well as several small businesses, an archery club, artists studios, a karate dojo and the Finnish society etc. We have included a series of photos of the intended exhibition space, they show nothing of the life that goes on around it, in the building, the town or the surrounding countryside. Visiting the exhibition that would have been more or less apparent.

Speaking of the place some of the works in this exhibition capture fragments of that life. Marie Florin involved the women of Gislaved’s handicraft society in Our hands made all of this. Their voices are joined together in her audio piece, like the crocheted doilies in her sculpture. Linnea M.F. Larsson’s Circlepit 371, where Gislaved’s hardcore punk scene is explored seems to activate a dormant culture, a sleeper cell beneath the ordinary. Superficially they appear quite separate, yet the same D-I-Y culture inhabits these pieces. What can come out of our work, when it is our own — not industrialised.

Gislaved nevertheless remains an industrial community, shaping itself around the industries that inhabit it and changing with them over time. Iron and leather, then
rubber, now plastics, automatization and lego production. The labour intensive processing of materials shifting
towards the immaterial, intellectual property and the programming of machinery. The hands moving away from the materials, to the cranks and levers and on to the keyboard.

Sally Karlsson’s Manpower: The human machine suggests that something was consumed by this, the motion (forward?) that chews up the working body, and something is spat out at the end a remnant in the empty factory. Now however we are shut out, and shutting you out, from our intended place, by circumstance or as Ti Karlsson’s Crowrona – a fable seems to suggest, the consequences of our actions the space that was emptied of workers is empty of art work.

At this time, other work spaces are emptied too, classrooms, auditoriums, meeting rooms, and offices, the studios at HDK Valand. Instead our homes are colonised by labour, kitchen tables turning into desks. Reshaping and adapting is the nature of industry; emptying and refilling.

In Gislaved factories are built and rebuilt. In some cases abandoned, being too specific, impractical or large. Most empty spaces are soon occupied by new ventures. It is a process not dissimilar to the transformation of this exhibition, the form is destroyed but the substance remains. The destruction of the object or of its elements, shown as a ritual in Anna Holmberg’s Four little lambs, is not so definitive. It is a transition, not from the material but of the material, into a new form or idea. Plastics, that have long been the staple of Gislaved’s industrial production are characterized precisely by this ability. Everywhere: they embrace us through our furniture, preserve our food, administer and package our medicine and clothes our bodies. Plastics make up the world that we live in, as well as a floating island of garbage in the sea. This island is as big as a seventh continent. What bodies inhabit it? The past is as distant as the future by Lisa Broms is a vision and a version of this. Out of one body into another, the immaterial as material — a matter-of-thought rather than matter-of-fact; the digital, the cloud, this exhibition is also flesh. Joseph Linderoth’s Future history: The new human body lets us glimpse this possibility.

Site specific to an unspecified site: the ideas are loosened from their substrate, continuing to speak of a place, they might still imagine a context (perhaps you will imagine the same from the photos). These works being severed from their intended space, from the context that they were made for and which to some extent made them have instead found new places, become site specific to your lap, next to the coffee cup on your desk, or the unopened rest of the mail on your kitchen table.
Trying to understand our displacement, I am reminded
of a work by Carsten Höller The Baudouin Experiment:
A Deliberate, Non-fatalistic, Large-scale Group Experiment
in Deviation. This participatory work that has been enacted a number of times since its conception in 2001, consists of isolating 100 people from the world for 24 hours. They are confined together, provided with amenities but not instructions and completely incapacitated. They are together in this confinement, in a shared space there are no recordings or transmissions of what happens during the experiment. (4)
Under the terms of various closures, lockdowns and
quarantines most of the worlds population now finds
itself similarly incapacitated, yet we are inversely isolated; we may share anything except space. A space, depending on its size and accessibility can generally be shared quite
freely (for) as long as it exists. But spaced experiences such as exhibitions, concerts, performances or the light over a certain landscape on a certain day, translate very badly. However excellent the documentation, brilliant the recording, lengthy the explanation or masterful the painting, it is always far from the original. It may be art and an original in (if not of) itself — but this is not the place.

Mille Holtegaard and Erik Ernsäter both transfer parts of Gislaved as a place. Ernsäter’s The longing for the ghost, is a concrete experience of place captured in walks, images and sounds abstracted, yet specific. Holtegaard inverts this process, never visiting Gislaved during the research phase of our project. The basis for Requiem was always distance, it is built upon what might be experienced of a place from afar. An experience that is superimposed on what is close to the spectator, if not Gislaved then for instance Copenhagen. The context of the work, or to be precise the experiencing of the work, remains tethered to the material, to the visceral experience of the world. Stella Dieden Richter’s Keep me wet: parted draws us in to this. The precise feeling of mud giving way to the weight of a tire or a foot is precisely what is lost in the immaterial, yet from experience we know it.

With this exhibition on paper, we have had to turn around suddenly and asked for conceptualisation, for description, for re-working and transformation, for new modes of presentation and address to the audience. The remaining question is whether this transformed state is a shadow of the work, whether it overshadows the work, or if this in fact has become the work. Caroline Uggla’s Internal motion reshapes the industrial material into organic forms that transform the factory space without activating it. This work and a few others apparent documentations cast another shadow, one of doubt. We may insist that this is in fact an exhibition but a question remains. Not the trivial conundrum: ‘is this art?’ But the interesting question — is this the art?

A transition or a translation, is never without loss. This exhibition was intended for a place and a space. Now the works have been ripped from that context. Some of what would have been shared experiences will be replaced by solitary ones, and the common knowledge, the hard fact of the work in the space has become a whisper. Viggo Mattsson’s Drag me backwards forward forever deals directly with that, with the place as it is here — G I S L A V E D. What is in a name (once a brand) as a material fact in itself, not an echo but a word steeped in meaning; an untranslatable concept.

VR-exhibitions, online viewing rooms, live streamed guided tours, all fall very short compared to being there — really you have to be there to understand. This is the case for Woodstock ’69 and for our exhibition. The reason I wanted to write about Carsten Höller’s experiment is only in part its play on isolation, but a much more important reason is that, I was never there. It is largely through Claire Bishop’s influential text the Social Turn (5) that the influence of Höller’s work extends farther than those 100 people locked in the Atomium. (Although one really had to be.) Along with almost everyone who knows about and talks about this work I have no experience of it as a space, but there is something outside it. Consider the friends, lovers, and families of a hundred people who were isolated for 24 hours, consider what it means, when the isolation is involuntary, when it goes on for years, when it is final.

Absence, loss and distance: are all part of the human condition. All we have is here and now, yet we are made up of memories and imagination, what we are is always something and somewhere else. Emelié Sterner’s She listened seems to deal with a distant memory remembering and re-imagining, being at once past and present selves. A collapse of linear time that might be created by a change of place, as if we shed versions of ourselves in all the places we move through. Gabriel Barria Colliander’s Long Stretch Help Old might be an incarnation (all flesh is grass (6)) of such a past and passed self, left behind along the way.

Travel through space is always travel through time and travel after this pandemic and in the face of climate change may never be the same (what we ‘millenials’ have been accustomed to), we were slowly adjusting to thinking of any trip as more or less a guilt-trip too, searching for ways to compensate. Now as airlines go bust and planes stay on the ground we must imagine distances differently — what if one minute underwater could give you one minute in the sky; Lisa Liljeström’s A one way trip to Gran Canaria, asks concretely. As a student of art history in the early 21st century, my teachers still made much of the aura that Walter Benjamin conceptualised 7, of the importance of encountering the actual work in itself. So, if you have to be there, how do you get there? Images could never do justice to the artworks they portrayed. Fragmenting and reshaping it like the sky in Yrsa Petersson’s Where the stars are shining at night. Yet it is precisely from the imagination of the artist that the work has emerged and into the imagination of the spectator that it must (re)turn. Any lasting impression that an artwork makes is therefore at a distance, in its absence.

At best this transition, this distancing of art is a democratic impulse, a step away from the commodified artwork towards something accessible to all, something that can be spread and shared as easily as a story or a text. At its worst, the immaterialisation of the artwork makes it exactly that; a story or a text, turns it into literature.

Art is somewhere else: This might always be the case,
as Marcel DuChamp pointed out, any work of art depends upon the spectator to come into contact with the external world, that is the creative act where art becomes art 8. Duchamp’s mathematical description of this process as a ‘deciphering’, appears dated. To many of us at this time ‘the external world’ seems ever so much a theoretical construct. What holds true is that the art work is an event, between the artist and the spectator. Not in the ‘somewhere’ represented by the exhibition space, it is the somewhere of the mind. But the mind in turn is somewhere too (here).

Making an exhibition, normally ends up as a question of placements, creating a topology of works so that relations more or less freely appear between them, and their context. This immaterial exhibition too is a means of placing this body of works. Not in a specific context but in the great unknown that is your hands. Our original exhibition would have closed on 20.05.10, this one I hope you will keep.