the Centre of Attention

For exhibition images click here

Mejan Labs
Royal Academy of Fine Arts
Akademigränd 3
112 59 Stockholm

Launch event: Wednesday 9 April 2008, 5 to 8 pm
Exhibition 10 April to 15 June 2008, Tuesdays to Fridays 11 am to 5 pm, Saturdays and Sundays 12 to 4 pm.

At Mejan Labs, Stockholm, the Centre of Attention provides a remix of 'Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft' (Düsseldorf 2007). The work brings together a number of wabi-sabi strands and foregrounds aspects of our practice in which all that art tries to make invisible we transform into art.

From the outset visitors can make changes to the work by adding, moving, editing and recombining elements, etc.

Gemeinschaft: family (kinship group) tribe - unity of will
Gesellschaft: self interest, civil society, contract - sacrifice of will

The open source nature of this work allows visitors to make artistic judgements and statements and to suggest challenges to our artistic and curatorial tropes. Further it allows us to attempt two specific things: a dematerialisation of the audience and an ever evolving/open ended installation.

Questions raised by this piece include whether the group thwarts the intention of the artist; or does a collective response add to the artist's intention?

Nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. The unstableness of the piece underpins the instability of definitions, of human interaction, of the work's existence and meaning.

The individual is an unstable subject but the subject as object can not avoid an increased entropic fate.

With thanks to Peter Hagdahl and Björn Norberg