Transmission
21/5–12/6 2021
Exhibiting students: Nada Ali, Johan Eriksson, Tim Høibjerg, Madeleine Jacobsson, Kasper Nordenström Jung, Siiri Jüris, Ida Lindgren, Karin Lindsten, Emelie Markgren, Malin Molin, Georg Nordmark, André Nordström, Cristian Quinteros Soto, Vinicius Jayme Vallorani, Hampus Wernemyr.
Konstakademien
Fredsgatan 12
Documentation and performances
Kuloa Distance
Emelie Markgren and Nina Grigorjeva
Performance work at the Royal Institute of Art’s MFA 2021 Graduation Show Transmission
Video 10:43 min.
Kulning is a historical herding technique practiced with the high frequencies of the voice to, for example, attract the animals after their forest grazing. In the evenings, maids could call with their voice for about 20 minutes until all cows were back to a hill farm. The women also called to each other between the mountains.
Kuloa distance is a study of how Kulning as a tool can be abstracted and modified. Emelie Markgren and Nina Grigorjeva’s performance investigates the possibilities of herding calls through the artists’ own internal concepts.
– We have used the place and the context as a starting point for the common sound image we create. It’s about distance, composition and communication. The exhibition hall is our mountain farm and the works around us become our cows. In the process, we have observed the functions and aesthetics of the Kulning, as well as the social matriarchy of mountain farm life. In the performance we play with these components. (Emelie Markgren)
Nada Ali’s performance-based video work takes its starting point in the idea of iconoclasm. Where a self-made ceramic sculpture in more-than-human size is broken and repaired multiple times, this performance preambles the second cycle of breakage and reparation.
The Arabic alphabet and numbers are inscribed inside the sculpture, functioning as a system for the re-assembling process. In the piece, Nada Ali deals with questions of loss, grief, and guilt. How much we can carry and how we prepare for the unforeseen.
– Iconoclasm is such an interesting act, I think, in both its contemporary and historical contexts. It creates an image that is more powerful than the one it has destroyed. It’s a sense of construction and destruction intimately related. (Nada Ali)