IDIODYSÉES – Jonas Liveröd presents the curatorial year of 2010.     

     
My love affair with Rogalands kunstsenter has been going through several phases over the past few years. This year I'm really flattered to  have been invited to curate a number of shows for the art centre and which I have given the overall name Idiodysées, journeys into areas where past and present, real and fiction, weird and crafty meet. 


First out is The Ballad of Materialism, a show including the Swedes Fredrik Lindkvist and Mattias Nordéus as well as Norwegian artist Are Mokkelbost. One of the more obvious aspects they have in common has given the show its title, the way they deal with materials and expressions which have a strong tradition but sometimes are viewed as old-fashioned or even obsolete. Each of them use these in ways that take the medium into new areas, defiantly individual without giving the finger to its traditions.

 

Are Mokkelbost is a trickster. They way he uses collage to decieve us into believing his world is as crafty as it is smart.  In the past few years the word on Are and his immensely detailed collages has started to leak across the border into Sweden. The classic cut and paste he has mastered to a virtuosity and his otherworldly, quirky, scary and semi-druggy imagery´s perfected detail puts him way ahead of the rest of the collage class of 2010.  

When I first encountered Fredrik Lindqvist's enormous wood-cut, colourful textile images it felt like staring through  church windows into a dense and skewed contemporary world. The sheer size and loose relation to these classic techniques give the over-powering and saturated iconography roots as much in the present as in some distant past. That Fredrik studied at the academy in Düsseldorf and lives in Germany since ages, might give a clue to his relaxed relation to the enormous formats he works best in.

Mattias Nordéus wood sculptures are refined takes on classic sculpture, possibly even Swedish folk art legends like
” Döderhultarn”.  The use of computer game aesthetics and stark realism, the altar-like elements and simple expressions endow the little objects with almost fetishistic powers. Mattias is as secretive and quiet as his sculptures, at the moment of writing this, he has yet to reveal his current work to me, something that intrigues me even more.

The second show in the Idiodyseè of 2010 is swedish artist Love Enqvist who I found one late night after rummaging through hundreds of artists, it was a little magazine called People and the sole image that opened up on page 24-25 immideately caught my attention. Love has done something I am almost envious of, travelled the world visiting and photographing the architecture of cults, visionaries, groupings and sects, mapping a world where the buildings are so much more than just places to dwell in. Looking for groups that use architecture as a vessel for beliefs, his book Diggers & Dreamers is a hallucinogenic journey to would-be utopias and closed societies. Aside from his show A moment of innocence, Love will also be working together with the kunstsenter on some site-specific pieces.

This year I have also been diving deep into architecture that no longer is only architecture, where a building through its past or its original ideas and purpose has been transformed into something else. For the show Neverlands revisited I have invited Lukas Feireiss as co-curator and Jonas Ohlsson , an Amsterdam based Swedish artist to realise the trip into Neverlands. Like in J M Barrie´s Peter Pan, we aim to follow the foot steps of the Lost boys, the motley crew of orphan boys who made Neverlands their own kingdom. However, our choice of Neverlands is the realm of the weird and wondrous world of architecture gone beyond. Outsider, dictator, unknown, visionary, mistaken and scary - the architecture we will bring up can be defined in many ways but no longer only as buildings as such.
Lukas is an excellent editor, curator and lecturer who I met through his work as editor of Arts & Architecture at the German publisher Die Gestalten. He invited me to be part of the book Beyond architecture. Originally he wanted to call it Neverlands but this was not to be, so here we take a second shot at revisiting Neverlands. Jonas Ohlsson I have collaborated with earlier as well. His strong, intuitive yet explicit mode of work fits the subject-matter and site specific work we were looking for in the artist involved. The creation of art is supposed to be a liberated area. However, this is almost never true but I have probably never encountered an artist more free in his expression than Jonas, something the rest of us should watch closely.  Jonas Ohlsson will create the architect-cum-sculptural work (possibly  - who knows what he´s going to do) that will house mine and Lukas´ journeys into post-post-architecture.

All in all, I hope to offer the audience of Stavanger part of  the things that have fascinated me in the past year, an idiodysée of people, places and the weird and wonderful experience of being alive in our year of the lord 2010.- Jonas Liveröd