17–27/11 2004, Santa Maria La Nova, Naples, Italy
3/7–3/10 2004, Villa Rosa, Villa San Michele, Anacapri, Italy
Art exhibition Vertigo
A joint project with Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation and Munthes Axel, Villa San Michele.
Artists: Eva Marklund, Petra Lindholm, Karin Ohlin, Tilda Lovell, Ann Böttcher, Richard G Carlsson, Martin Ålund.
Curator: Martin Ålund, Co-curator: Richard G. Carlson, Assistant Curator: Power Ekroth.
Catalog Writers: Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Bengt Jangfeldt, Power Ekroth, Jakob Staberg.
Electronica music group S.L.E.M. (Stockholm Live Electronic Music Lars Åkerlund, Andreas Berthling, Jean-Louis Huhta, Johan Skugge, Benny Nilssen) performed during the opening in Santa Maria La Nova, Naples.
The beauty of Capri can also be frightening, as the roads seem to end in vertical precipices plunging straight into the sea – how easy to simply let oneself fall and disappear. I try to overcome my vertigo, and carefully sit down at the cliff's edge. Eventually I can take no more of this, so I stand up and walk away. I am filled with an intense awareness of my existence. I wake up several times in the middle of the night with the sensation of falling.
The exhibition Vertigo deals with an unsentimental reconquering of a set of values in art that can be difficult to formulate. Values that are often considered spent or exhausted I would like to talk of poetry and use terms such as sublimity or the beautiful without seeming either romantically moralising, or (tediously) post-modern and subsequently end up in the meaninglessness of it all. In art, as well as other areas, much of what we see expresses an exploitation of emotion. Emotion has become instrumentalised. Art is thus stripped of its contradictory nature and complex emotional value, and exposed as a media adapted spectacle. The art presented in Vertigo does not stake emotional claims using flamboyant gestures. The impetus for emotion, however, plays a key role in these expressions nevertheless.
Vertigo is not only a word, but also a bodily experience. In order to maintain the relevance of an expression, a return to the corporeal is necessary. Poetry. Grasping the unformulatable. The sublime. The beautiful that within itself bears its own antithesis. Several writers have been invited to contribute with a text dealing with Vertigo without making direct references to the art works. In a situation where all interpretations are possible, an indefinable span of possibilities also emerges.
MARTIN ÅLUND
Artist/Curator