The suggestive body
The suggestive body explores existential issues concerning the physical and mental body, reflecting the world we live in today, while raising thoughts about our bodily experiences in contemporary society.
The suggestive body looks at the body and physicality from an experience-based perspective and from personal lived reality. The exhibition takes embodiment as a doorway to issues and proposals relating to interactions and situations that a body can be exposed to. Both the body’s inner physiological composition and the social, economic, and political impact of humans is portrayed in the exhibition’s works, which also explore several phenomena in science fiction, mysticism, colonialism and intimacy, together with performance-based narrative approaches and extra-human organisms.
In The suggestive body, artists contribute their excerpts from different kinds of existential being and present the body’s physical conditions and their own lived bodily experiences. This concrete artistic agency illustrates our facetted understanding of the world we exist in and – through our relationship to other bodies – our awareness of the limitations we must negotiate physically.
The exhibition illustrates how our existence is hanging by a fragile thread, and links various social and ethical issues to a multi-layered debate on the times we are living in today. The suggestive body thus offers a portrayed observation with the intention of revealing our imprint on the greater social body.
The exhibition is curated by Hampus Bergander, Konstmuseet i Norr.
ARTISTS
A K Dolven (born 1953 in Oslo) lives and works in Oslo and Lofoten. Dolven studied at École des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence, the École National Supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo. Dolven’s practice involves a variety of media: painting, photography, performance, installation, film and sound. Recurring themes are the representation of forces of nature and their impact on human feelings. Her works alternate between monumental and minimal formats, universal and intimate subjects. Interpersonal relations and interactions are central in her practice, and many of her performance-based works include collaborations with other artists.
Linda Morell (born 1993 in Halmstad) studied at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Art and Design in Bergen. She lives and works in Bergen. Morell’s sculptural practice frequently operates according to a clinical aesthetic, exploring the relationship between body and object. Reinterpreting historical theories on the human body, she shapes her sculptures out of materials such as clay, steel and glass. Based on myths, medicine and science, her works generate speculative future scenarios involving the optimised body.
Anni Puolakka (born 1983 in Oulu) studied at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Puolakka is based in Helsinki and teaches at the Aalto University in Espoo. Puolakka’s practice uses multiple media, including performance, video, installation, drawing and text, and incorporates documentary material into fictive worlds. Their works play with the limits and potential of humanoid animals seeking meaningful and living – occasionally sleepy or complex – interaction with other creatures, objects and settings. They experiment with traditions from stage and screen, and with contemporary approaches.
Erika Roux (born 1991 in Paris) has studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. In her practice, Roux uses experimental cinematic methods, with a narrative technique building on a personal and intimate approach to her subject matter. Her works explore the complexity embedded in relationships and identities, and the social interactions that shape them. Alongside her own individual artistic practice Roux currently runs WET, a video art collective based in Rotterdam.
Matti Sumari (born 1987 in Helsinki) lives and works in Malmö. He studied at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. Sumari’s main medium is sculpture, with aluminium and plastic waste as his raw materials. In his work, Sumari explores man’s unsustainable relationship to plastic – the material we overproduce. Alongside his own artistic practice, Sumari is the coordinator of the artist run gallery Alta Art Space in Malmö.
Erik Thörnqvist (born 1994 in Umeå) grew up in Luleå and now lives and works in Stockholm. Thörnqvist is currently pursuing a master’s degree in fine art at Kungl. Stockholm Academy of the Arts. Thörnqvist applies fictive, historic, collective, and personal perspectives to explore affective states and works. His art incorporates time and space – a fictional, experience-based universe that gradually emerges before us. His installations focus on concepts such as authenticity and objectivity, using an approach that is both encyclopaedic and quasi-scientific.