Johanna Gustafsson Fürst work for consonni falls into two parts. The first is called I Believe I’m/it’s fake, I Believe I’m/it’s for Real -in Memory we Trust, and the second, in collaboration with artist Lisa Torell, Outlined Clearly/Clean Out. A renegotiation of space through two performances, an installation monologue and a conversation- act.
Johanna Gustafsson Fürst work for consonni falls into two parts. The first is called I Believe I’m/it’s fake, I Believe I’m/it’s for Real -in Memory we Trust, and the second, in collaboration with artist Lisa Torell, Outlined Clearly/Clean Out.
I Believe I’m/it’s fake, I Believe I’m/it’s for Real -in Memory we Trust. continues Pablo Martes’ The problem lies in the medium, which ends in a dramatization of a fragment of The Aesthetics of Resistance I by Peter Weiss. Johanna starts in the Aesthetics of Resistance II where the narrator describes the artist Gericault’s struggle with the painting, The Raft of the Medusa, woven into a description of the catastrophe that caused the horrible incident. It runs parallel with a description of a Europe in crisis and his own painful choice between politics and artistic practice.
I Believe I’m/it’s fake, I Believe I’m/it’s for Real -in Memory we Trust. is a performance sculpture composed of a transparent black tent, a black megaphone and a speech. The speech is a schizophrenic monologue that extends Peter Weiss' novel and thereby inscribes itself within a historical chain of events and of recurring political betrayal. The speech makes use of actions, both artistic and political. The speech and the megaphone express a kind of materiality of democracy. Politics and art have the potential to create connections between the constructed, coherent world and the material world, where the material reality at times reaches a position capable of moving and changing our modes of thinking. In the tradition of Gericault and Peter Weiss, I Believe I’m/it’s fake, I Believe I’m/it’s for Real -in Memory we Trust explores such a position.
Outlined Clearly/Clean Out is a performance that builds a site-specific installation in collaboration with the artist, Lisa Torell. This collaboration is a continuation of a work that began at Biro Beograd Residency Block 70 in Belgrade 2012, where methods and notions rooted in the politics of specific sites and situations were examined.
In Outlined Clearly/Clean Out the audience will take part in a conversation-act that is bound to devastate something and build something else. The translation is a part of the performance and emphasizes spatial transformations through language.
I Believe I’m/it’s fake, I Believe I’m/it’s for Real -in Memory we Trust revels in history and memory and thereby weaves references together into a new situation. Outlined Clearly/Clean Out aims to reverse the process; through the reorganisation of the present, new concepts, memories and stories are constructed. Outlined Clearly/Clean Out investigates contiguous methods for making knowledge that perhaps didn't previously exist. The piece will be built and rehearsed between 28 June and 3 July and performed 3 July.
Johanna Gustafsson Fürst was born in 1973 and is based in Stockholm. She graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2003.
Her practice consists of situation-specific and concept-based sculptures and installations in which the mirroring and materialization of the social space in the built space works as an entrance to questions about politics, location, history and social context. In 2003 she was one of the initiators of ak28, a self-organized and mostly self-funded collective of artists, architects and curators, which ran a space for exhibiting artistic practices in Stockholm between 2004-2008. In 2008 she co-founded Kista Theatre, a nomadic platform for art and theatre with the city as stage and content.
2012 she was a grantholder at Iaspis in Stockholm. She is currently represented by the Niklas Belenius gallery.
Lisa Torell was born 1972 and is based in Stockholm and Tromsö. She participates regularly in national and international exhibitions and publications. The public sphere, cultural expressions, statements, individual or national representations and identity -what is reflected and what emerges? How and why? Culture is constructed and society mirrored. Lisa Torell investigates society by looking at what there is to see and what is evaluated from the outside; she tries to find out what it is that shapes our way of seeing, and how to change it. She was chair of the Swedish contemporary art foundation Index from 2010 to 2013, has written essays for the Brussels-based A-prior magazine and the National Museum Stockholm, and is currently working with Cm by cm, metre by metre, km by km at block 70 Biro Beograd, Belgrade and with Goro Tronsmo and 0047 Oslo.
