Our solo exhibition Shadows – hold their breath – will be displayed in the enigmatic 18th-century belvedere in the secluded Spökparken, in central Stockholm, 27 October–5 November 2022.
The exhibition features ethereal transfigurations of wooden Baroque sculptures of saints, angels, and monks, which the two artists have rescued from oblivion. Like elusive and enigmatic shafts of light, they reach out across the pavilion, illuminating the interior as the chill winter light slants across a landscape of imminent decay.
The sculptures, housed in various village churches in the countryside of Oaxaca, Mexico, have been captured through a laborious procedure. The “slow-animation technique”, an aesthetic manifestation devised by the artists and refined over years of work, merges analog photography with digital imaging. The essence of the moldering sculptures, distilled through a homebuilt pinhole camera, was exposed directly onto 4x5-inch sheets of photographic paper. Requiring exceptionally long exposures under unpredictably diffractive conditions for each image, each animation cycle took a full day to capture the trajectory of the light. The photos were then hand colored and transformed into cinéapparitions. In the exhibition, these decomposing icons of religious practice are now recomposed for posterity as the haunting phantoms of ephemerality itself.
Shadows – hold their breath – the exhibition's title is borrowed from Emily Dickinson’s poem There’s a certain Slant of light. Like the poem, the exhibition offers a somber meditation on the emotional weight of time’s passing and the sense of passing pain—a grand, even beautiful pain, gilded with spiritual significance.
Welcome!
Free entry.
Shadows – hold their breath
by Geska & Robert Brečević / Performing Pictures
27 October–5 November 2022
Opening Thursday, 27 October 16:00 - 19:00 in the presence of the artists.
Opening hours Friday–Saturday 16:00 - 18:00
Lusthuset in Spökparken
Drottninggatan 116b, Vasastan (T-Rådmansgatan)
Stockholm, Sweden
Arranged with support from No Picnic design studio and Embajada de México en Suecia.
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Annually since 2012, SEART has presented an extraordinary array of Swedish artists in an 18th-century venue in the heart of Stockholm. Combining the capricious and the intellectually challenging, SEART promises an eclectic and visually vertiginous experience in the pavilion Lusthuset in Spökparken.
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