Upcoming exhibition: Our Inner Nature

22 FEBRUARY–19 JUNE 2014

OUR INNER NATURE
Works from the Malmö Art Museum Collection
Ann Böttcher, Kajsa Dahlberg, Olafur Eliasson, Carl Fredrik Hill, Joachim Koester, EvaMarie Lindahl, Sivert Lindblom, Anna Ling, Gerhard Nordström, Henrik Olesen, Nina Saunders, Lars-Andreas Tovey Kristiansen.

PRESS PREVIEW: 20 February at 11 am
OPENING: 21 February at 5-8 pm

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Bettina Pehrsson, Curator and Director, Marabouparken art centre bettina.pehrsson@marabouparken.se

Cecilia Widenheim, Director, Malmö Art Museum
cecilia.widenheim@malmo.se

FOR INFORMATION AND PRESS IMAGES, PLEASE CONTACT:
niki.kralli@marabouparken.se

Our Inner Nature

Marabouparken art centre kicks off the spring season with two exhibitions in which conceptions of nature and naturalness in a roundabout way open the door to our fickle “inner nature”, which manifests itself in that which is accepted and that which is rejected, in history, culture, in our language and in our idea of ourselves.

While Malmö Art Museum is closed during the spring for renovations, its collection is presented in a new context and for a new audience, at Marabouparken art centre. With the point of departure in Marabouparken’s own history and what it can tell us about the ideals and the time in which it was designed, the exhibition presents works from the Malmö Art Museum’s Nordic collection in which nature, and that which is considered natural, are the elusive reference points of the beautiful and the normal, as well as of the threatening and the uncontrollable in our lives.

The exhibition gathers twelve prominent Nordic artists whose works span from the 1880s to the present day and reflects on the scope of the collection as well as its unique Nordic profile. Via nature, the works reflect and comment on our civilisation and cultural history in which the concept of nature often starts and ends in our own hands.

In the exhibition, Carl Fredrik Hill’s emotional drawings of a threatened and threatening nature encounter Ann Böttcher’s installation Germania – the Birth Certificate/Deutsche Character (Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün) (2008) which reveals how nature came to characterise the Nazi ideology, in which the landscape was related to German identity. In several works, nature appears as a scene for political reflection, as in Gerhard Nordström’s En utflykt i det Gröna from the series Sommaren 1970 in which the Vietnam War with its ghastly consequences was suddenly tangibly present as it took place in the middle of the Swedish summer idyll.

Our blindness to everything outside our immediate sphere of life is also put under the microscope in Kajsa Dahlberg’s installation No Unease Can Be Noticed, All Are Happy And Friendly (2010), comprising 700 postcards sent by Swedish people visiting Jerusalem. The greetings deal with banalities such as minor annoyances, what they eat, what they see, how the trip has been and how pleasant it is to be in the Holy Land. War and troubles are rarely mentioned in what must be one of the world’s most conflict-ridden areas.

Several of the works put our influence on nature in perspective, such as Anna Ling’s mapping of the limestone quarry of Limhamn, in Fossil och Polystyren (2013), where 60-million-year-old shark tooth fossils share the stage with casts of flying pieces of polystyrene from contemporary building sites on the crest of the limestone quarry. Or in Lars-Andreas Tovey Kristiansen’s film The Radiant City (2010) from the city of Pripyat which was abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and where plants and animals have found a safe haven in the absence of human beings, traffic and factories.

With the explicit aim of not looking designed but as a piece of land that emerged naturally, comprising local, indigenous plants, Marabouparken art centre is situated in a park that was laid out in 1937–1955. The landscape architects wanted to refine the inherent qualities of the already existing landscape, undiluted by unnecessary and foreign additions. However, the ambition to raise the status of the domestic landscape and its characteristics had a darker side to it. In European politics and culture at the time, in the 1930s, there emerged a related idea of distinguishing between domestic and foreign elements – just as today.

The exhibition Our Inner Nature is presented in parallel with Katja Aglert’s solo exhibition On Invasive Grounds.