What the Others Knew


LEIF HOLMSTRAND: What the Others Knew

 

Johan Berggren Gallery is pleased to announce as it’s inaugural
exhibition, a solo presentation of Malmö based artist Leif Holmstrand
(b. 1972). Holmstrand has exhibited widely in various contexts during
the past decade, earning a name for himself as both a performance artist
and a critically acclaimed visual artist. Not to forget his position as
one of the leading poets of a younger generation.

 

The current exhibition consists of two parts. The first being a large
scale installation in the front room of the gallery. The stage is set by
a number of sculptural elements resulting in a tense and somewhat
claustrophobic environment contextualising ideas, motifs and techiques
from an earlier body of works. However the ongoing storytelling,
emmanating from a performative experience about body & gender, history &
identity is boundary breaking. Whether inside of the installation or
viewing the room from the outside, past as well as a notion of now are
transcended, resulting in what could best be described as a timeless
psychodrama.

 

In the second room of the gallery the setting is different. In the
sparse and serene environment we witness ”what the others knew”. An
overlapping documentation of the actual making of the installation ”What
the Others Knew” has resulted in an intricate series of photographs
where pivotal moments in the making are paired with cerebral lines of
thought. At a critical spot in the room a sculptural self-portrait ”Hon
ligger i delar” rests and accentuates the context and could be seen as
an epicentre around which the exhibition is evolving or ending.

 

An earlier exhibition in the spring 2009, at the gallery’s premises on
Östra Tullgatan, was a ”mini-retrospective” and a testbed that saw
mainly sculptural objects by Holmstrand from the past ten years coming
together for the first time. In the current exhibition Holmstrand’s
overall aim has been to move beyond the singular object as a brick in a
narrative play. Instead Holmstrand swaps the ideal of the isolated
object for a more open ended, scenographic and challenging environment.

 
Johan Berggren

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