Warmly welcome to the exhibition of Erik Thörnqvist at Galleri Mejan, the Royal Institute of Art’s student gallery.
Opening hours:
Mon–Fri 12.00–18.00
Sat–Sun 12.00–17.00
Exhibition 11/11 – 20/11. Vernissage Friday 11 november 17.00–21.00.
Erik Thörnqvist
Raumplanning on Vaseline Alley
Erik Thörnqvist works with sculpture and installation, drawing from personal, historical and fictional narratives to approach how idea-based systems materialize and effect bodies. His practice takes its point of departure within ready-mades and found objects such as pipe fittings, parts of scaffolding and architectural details. Influenced by his experiences of growing up in the North of Sweden and the conflict between those who live and use the area and the extraction of natural resources for economic gain, Thörnqvist wants his works to communicate as a spectrum and a gradient of experiences – rather than polarizing opposites.
For his MFA solo presentation at Galleri Mejan, Thörnqvist deviates from asking what it means to be a body in space, to be able to breathe. Moreover, through investigating the dichotomy between the domestic and public spheres. Furthermore, to explore if modernism, as a profound representation of modernity (as a method of thinking and building a societal structure), continues to have an influence on bodies today. Thörnqvist draws lines between burned homosexual bodies in the Middle Ages, where the stench from their decaying corpses was concealed with fennel, and club kids dropping dead on dancefloors. And other lines between Adolf Loos’s Raum Plan and dark rooms. Through speculation and creating another spatiality with ties to a modernist villa, a gay club and a medieval fennel field, Thörnqvist unfolds questions around the home as an institution.
