The exhibition Hydrotop at Art Lab Gnesta presents new works by ten students from the Royal Institute of Art, addressing water as an element and concept.
During a year-long eponymous course, the students addressed questions about the artist’s role, science and ideology in the current environmental situation of melting ice and rising sea levels. Their working process work has led them to places such as a coal mine and the global seed vault in Longyearbyn on Svalbard, to dark evening dips at Veskyärve in the Sörmland forest and a floating seminar on Frösjön just next to Art Lab Gnesta. The artist’s own physical experiences have been central to the work, as have the meetings with researchers, writers and artists who have visited the course.
Water is the element connecting all forms of life on earth. From Art Lab Gnesta’s large hall, the exhibition flows between the rooms, out through the greenhouse and down to the water’s edge, in a movement that reminds us of art’s ability to give shape to the as yet inconceivable.
Hydrotop is an stand-alone continuation of the previous courses Isotop (2017-2018) and Ekotop (2018-2019). Together they form a bigger picture of the relationship between nature, industry and today’s environmental situation and the consequences and effects of industrialisation and human behaviour.
Artists: Mattias Andersson, Sarali Borg, Sara Ekholm Eriksson, Elina Eriksson, Nicole Newsha Khadivi, Johanna Kindahl, Lina Lundquist, Lior Nønne Malue Hansen, Hannah Nyberg and Alex Valijani.
Initiator and course leader: Lina Selander and Björn Larsson