Annika Eriksson

The Göteborg Konsthall starts off the year 2008 with the first one-woman show of Annika Eriksson’s work held in Sweden. Annika Eriksson is internationally one of Sweden’s most exhibited artists. She is especially interested in social structures and human behaviour, and often pursues her art by means of various kinds of collaboration. Her focus on everyday settings and situations often conveys an almost absurd sense of comedy. Examples of her previous projects include a fully functioning amusement arcade in Venice and films on post office orchestras and collectors. The Göteborg Konsthall exhibition presents both older works and several new ones.

A frequent starting point for Annika Eriksson’s artistic practice is the ever varying functions of the city, its public spaces and inhabitants. One of the new works at the exhibition is a small house erected at Näckrosdammen in central Göteborg. A neon sign on the roof supplies the message that this is a building “For anyone and for anything”. Inside the Göteborgs Konsthall another aspect of the work is on show – a film of three carpenters building this structure.

Annika Eriksson often reveals her interest in various forms of social activities and relations. In a recent video at the exhibition she has collaborated with the sports car club Sportvagnsklubben Göteborg. In it we witness a number of these motoring enthusiasts (who frequently park their vehicles at Götaplatsen in Göteborg) conducting an improvised rubber-burning motor parade.

The exhibition presents the ‘first ever’ extensive survey of the artist’s earlier work. This includes, for instance, “A Fearful Conspiracy”, “The Session”, “The Staff at the Moderna Museet”, “Copenhagens Post Office Orchestra”, “Wicked Game” and “Do You Want an Audience?”

To accompany the exhibition the Göteborg Konsthall is producing an illustrated book containing a newly written essay by the critic Will Bradley.

Annika Eriksson (born in 1956 in Malmö, southern Sweden) lives and works in Berlin. She represented Sweden at the 2005 Venice biennial, and in recent years has exhibited at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Kunstverein München, Platform Galerie in Istanbul, and at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. January 2008 finds her again in the news with “Mannen i parken” (The Man in the Park) – a new work produced by Mobile Art Production in Stockholm. She will also participate in the group exhibition “Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie” at the Tensta Konsthall and as a recipient of the Bäckström award at the Malmö Konstmuseum.

THE LAST ROUND OF CHANGES

In the autumn of 2007 Annika Eriksson invited the critic Will Bradley to respond to a selection of her photographs. The result was a book which will be distributed by Göteborgs Konsthall.

"If things were different, if tomorrow was not the certain falling into place of all the carefully-fashioned pieces that today, once again, were lifted up and set into position by the perpetual spinning of this overbalancing wheel, if the raising of the curtain, the expectant applause of the crowd, the first dazzle of the lights did not already contain the silence that follows, the empty theatre, the darkened streets, then you and I might wake tomorrow not from a brief and uneasy sleep but from ourselves, from the world as it is, from the inevitable courtyards and doorways, the distant hillsides, the beaty of autumn, the aesthetics of decay, the rusted chain-link fence hanging from half-fallen steel posts, the suburban neon, the cathedral bells, thepower of knowledge, the beauty of data, the X-ray mahine, the high-speed train, the spation-temporal fix, The concrete arcading of a small-town shopping centre shelters us as we wait for the performance to begin. Empty cans and paper bags blow across the rain-spattered paving."

Annika Eriksson