The 2021 Stena Foundation Culture Scholarships

Monumental architecture, seismic waves and building blocks from imaginary worlds. The Gothenburg Museum of Art finishes the year with a large-format installation by Emanuel Röhss, in which moving images, audio and stage design transform the room. Welcome to the press preview on 2 December.

On 4 December, the exhibition by Emanuel Röhss, winner of the Stena Foundation Culture Scholarship for 2021 in visual art, will open at the Gothenburg Museum of Art. The exhibition features site-specific installations and an essay film which is shown to the public for the first time.

Emanuel Röhss (b 1985) trained at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, the Valand Academy in Gothenburg, and the Royal College of Arts in London, where he took a master’s degree in Fine Arts. Presently he is active as an artist in Los Angeles. Röhss’ art is often site-specific and materials and media varia depending on the project. His works interweave imaginary settings and physical places, the past and the future, fiction and reality.

• The installation is Emanuel Röhss’ most extensive project so far in the context of a solo exhibition. It contains references to both Frank Lloyd Wright’s mythical buildings in Mayan Revival Architecture in Los Angeles and the splendid architecture of the 1923 Jubilee Exhibition in Gothenburg. The public can also take part of Röhss’ first film piece[EN1] , Monster Dialectics, says Eva Nygårds, the curator at the Gothenburg Museum of Art responsible for the exhibition.

The Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture is an important institution in the cultural life of Gothenburg, which provides unique opportunities for artists to produce new works and increase their visibility. In conjunction with its 25^th anniversary, culture scholarships have been awarded to three culture practitioners who each receive 300 000 SEK to stimulate their development. Since 1996, the Foundation has awarded 155 scholarships to further the training of talented people in art, music, theatre, dance, literature and scenography. Furthermore, the Foundation has supported many different projects in research and culture in Sweden.

A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the exhibition, including longer personal interviews and a plethora of visual material for each recipient of the culture scholarships. Short introductory films featuring all the scholars are shown in the exhibition and provide further in-depth knowledge about them.

The motivation is as follows:

The artist Emanuel Röhss

Emanuel Röhss investigates the ability of the room to create fiction by combining architecture, ornamentation and visual culture. The creative process takes place in the intersection between sculpture, installation and the moving image, but materials and media can vary depending on site-specific characteristics.

Decorative elements fetched from buildings or filmic sequences are reborn as stage design and rebuilt into new worlds. In ambiguous installations, the viewer’s experience of the surroundings changes, establishing a kind of no man’s land that contains both cultural memory and subconscious layers.

For an artistic production which transforms space, stretches the limits of perception and expands the field of artistic expression, Emanuel Röhss has been awarded the 2021 Scholarship from the Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture.

The recipients of the 2021 Stena Foundation Culture Scholarships are:

The soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan

The artist Emanuel Röhss

The actress and producer Alicia Vikander

Contact

Eva Rosengren, Press liaison
031-368 31 66, eva.rosengren@kultur.goteborg.se

Eva Nygårds, Curator
031-368 35 03, eva.nygards@kultur.goteborg.se

Patrik Steorn, Museum Director
031-368 35 01, patrik.steorn@kultur.goteborg.se

The 2021 Stena Foundation Culture Scholarships

4 December 2021 – 20 March 2021

The Stena hall