Video documentation of two performance works at the Royal Institute of Art’s MFA 2021 Graduation
Show Transmission, Konstakademien 21 May–12 June 2021
Client: The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
Year: 2021
Media: Video
Read more: https://kkh.se/en/public-program/exhibitions/graduation-show-mfa-21/
The Making and Breaking of an Icon (2021) Nada Ali.
Video 13:50 min. by Performing Pictures
Nada Ali’s performance-based video work takes its starting point in the idea of iconoclasm. Where a self-made ceramic sculpture in more-than-human size is broken and repaired multiple times, this performance preambles the second cycle of breakage and reparation.
The Arabic alphabet and numbers are inscribed inside the sculpture, functioning as a system for the re-assembling process. In the piece, Nada Ali deals with questions of loss, grief, and guilt. How much we can carry and how we prepare for the unforeseen.
Kuloa Distance (2021) by Emelie Markgren and Nina Grigorjeva
Video 10:43 min. by Performing Picture
Kulning is a historical herding technique practised with the high frequencies of the voice to, for example, attract the animals after their forest grazing. In the evenings, maids could call with their voice for about 20 minutes until all cows were back to a hill farm. The women also called to each other between the mountains.
Kuloa distance is a study of how Kulning as a tool can be abstracted and modified. Emelie Markgren and Nina Grigorjeva’s performance investigates the possibilities of herding calls through the artists’ own internal concepts.