EXPO ‘Teach us to outgrow our MADNESS’ -Platina Gallery, Stockholm (Suede) 27 Mai- 19 juin 2010
TEACH US TO OUTGROW OUR MADNESS
KAREN PONTOPPIDAN – MIRO SAZDIC
« Karen Pontoppidan (DK) is currently a professor at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm.
Miro Sazdic´ was born in former Yugoslavia, but moved to Sweden at an early age. She was educated at Konstfack in Stockholm, and has for some time now been teaching there. The title of the exhibit, « Teach us to outgrow our madness« , is borrowed from the Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe. It refers to transition, the desire to evolve into a state of wisdom, but touches also on our need for others to help us learn.
Both of these artists are in the midst of life and they cast their gazes both forward and backward in time. They both look back on childhood, with its intuitive games and the non-learned attitude to the world that a child possesses.
The exhibit is divided into two rooms, illustrating childhood and the transition into the adult world.
Miro Sazdic – 1976
Karen Pontoppidan – « Family portraits’ (I et II)
The first room places us in childhood. The floor is covered in feathers that move fleetingly in accord with the movements of the visitors. Who hasn’t, as a child, followed a feather’s peaceful journey through the air and been amazed at its path?
And Karen Pontoppidan adds, « If the room has been deserted after a pillow fight or if it reminds us of a dreamlike childhood wish, this we leave to the visitor to decide. »
Miro Sazdic´ is showing works that she, resembling a child at play, has tried to create intuitively, without the already learned, which can create more walls than open fields. She focuses on creativity as a meditative process, where time and space is forgotten in favor of the freedom of here and now. Like the young child, still uninfluenced by the age in which he/she lives and before entering into the teenager’s fear of being ostracized from the group. The jewelry she shows is not like anything we have seen before, either. The pieces she calls « 1976 » initially appear to be large, lumpy pieces of jewelry, but if we look closer we see an endless number of stitches and seams and realize at once that lots of time and strong emotions have been the prerequisites for these pieces. « Gate keepers » is a series of amulets. They represent hope and the potential of being rediscovered and are intended to be worn inside one’s clothing.
Karen Pontoppidan centers her work, « Family Portraits« , around the family we are born into – to a life we have not chosen, but been assigned to; people with different personalities who are securely linked together generation after generation. She illustrates family structures and portrays in her jewelry images of people who, close beside each other, mirror the family we know or do not know.
« The portraits used in this work are not of real, existing human beings. The drawings are representing different personalities. I have used them to illustrate different family structures », says Karen Pontoppidan.
Miro Sazdic - ‘phantom Limb’
Karen Pontoppidan – ‘Home’
When we enter the second room of the exhibit, we step into the adult world. This room differs from the first one and produces an entirely different atmosphere.
On the floor, we can read a text that will be erased during the exhibit, caused by the movements of the visitors through the room. Like a story and a memory that slowly diminishes as time passes. As adults, we now have the opportunity to reflect upon the choices we’ve made, simultaneously accepting the fact that others dictate our actions.
In the series, « Home« , Karen Pontoppidan looks forward in time, at the homes we humans create in order to thrive and feel secure on an everyday level, the ways we want to feel and situations in which we feel we belong. Home consists accordingly of not only a physical place, but even of the feeling of being at home that we can experience in the material world and our relationships with other people.
The material she uses is pewter from melted down heirlooms. By destructively melting down old objects, she illustrates the artistic process of passing something on, to create a new home for the objects that were inherited for generations.
Miro Sazdic´ shows here a series she calls « Phantom Limb« . She says that we are born as original, individual beings and, as teenagers and adults, we are molded to fit into a group. If that which is individual in each child falls outside of the framework for the group’s consensus, it is regarded as a negative trait and the child risks being expelled.
« What is regarded as being deviant for the group is for the individual unique. And what is generally accepted for the group becomes then deviant to the individual, for it then demands the elimination of something basic, individual and self-evident », Miro Sazdic´ adds.
The pieces she is showing are like bandages, wrapped several times around emptiness. It is as if she has fostered the phantom emotions that can haunt our minds, resembling the presence of ghosts in the otherwise so perfect world, which we grown-ups try in vain to create. » (Sofia Björkman Platina, May 2010)
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