Even a Perfect Crime Leaves a Trace

Even a Perfect Crime Leaves a Trace Even a Perfect Crime Leaves a Trace" was a solo exhibition at Gothenburg Konsthall that investigated the institution's 100 year history. The exhibition began with the presumption that investigating history is an attempt at trying to understand events and objects that can never be experienced firsthand. Thus the exhibition hall was conceived as a crime scene where bodies/artworks met their early demise, removed by the perpetrators prior to my arrival. I begin with an unsolvable problem, 'what happened here'; all I was left with were traces or evidence found in archives or etched into the floors, ceiling and walls. The exhibition presented a series of sculptures, installations and a curated exhibition that referenced events that left a mark on the institution and the city. In addition to my own artworks I invited several international and Gothenburg-based artists and writers to contribute to the exhibition.

Download the exhibition brochure here.

The first sets of images present “The Network is Also a Kind of Actor” a wall painting with framed digital prints in the entry hall of the Konsthall. This honeycomb pattern is a strategy borrowed from a Gothenburg artist Nils Olof Bonnier, who vanished at sea in 1969, and whose body has never been found. The pattern coincides with a systems theory Bonnier developed suggesting a non-hierarchical approach to order and force all things are actors in a network of relations.

The second sets of images show “Evidence of an Exhibition”, a series of artworks within an uncertain tableau where it is unclear if an exhibition is being installed, de-installed or has simply been forgotten. Everything is purposely upturned, scattered and muddled. All these small catastrophes are artworks that reference events that occurred in the institutions past. Each one is created to memorialize an artwork, event, artist, animal or substance that left a trace on the exhibition hall. Several sculptures use elements from artworks, catalogs or exhibition furniture transformed to shift the objects meaning. On the right side can been seen a wall of postcards representing an investigation or a network of relations, featuring images of people, parts of artworks and poor documentation of events.

Each of the objects in the space are described in the brochure providing some clues to their place in history. Directly across the room on the wall we can see a small taxidermied bird perched on a rolled up Tim Hunter photograph from the series Life and Death in Hackney. This bird represents a Willow Warbler that was said to have flown into the gallery numerous times during the first Gothenburg Biennial intent on roosting on the same photograph. The lighting for the exhibition is produced almost entirely by equipment (slide projectors and overhead projectors) that artists have used but which are now on the edge of obsolescence.

The next set of images presents a curated exhibition in the exhibition “Ny Ny Realitet” featuring 20 works by historically important Swedish and Gothenburg-based artists. On reaching this gallery viewers realized they could not enter the room, both of its doors had been bricked over sealing the work in and them out. They could read a list of works in the brochure and see through the cracks that there were certainly artworks inside, but not all the works were visible - history is presented but at a distance with limited access.

Media: sculpture, audio, installation, performance and curated art works.
Dimensions: Variable
Year: 2013
Location: Gothenburg Konsthall
Image credit: Hossein Sehatlou and Anthony Marcellini