Becoming Landscape

For the exhibition project Becoming Landscape, artist and curator Anna Viola Hallberg/SE has invited artists she worked closely with during the last 2 years. – The title refers to mental landscapes and how, as artists, we can continue to work and create platforms where we can rethink the various systems, we are part of.

invited artists:
Ami Skånberg/SE – Oona Hyland/IR – Patrik Qvist/SE – Anastasia Zhikhartseva/SE/RU – Thierry Mortier/SE/BE

During 2020-2022 one hundred artists shared and explored one site in the Stockholm Archipelago (Björkö Konstnod, BKN) with me. It became a transformative, dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature:

a space for developing community and poetic investigations, seeking to explore and interpret possibilities beyond violence, algorithms, narrow-mindedness and repression by looking at asymmetries. – By doing this we changed a perceived way of efficiency, often associated with artist residencies. Anna Viola Hallberg

We elaborated up on a new reference system based on care strategies, unfolding ways to share as astrong and generous act and through this act establishing a fabric – a landscape – that we all become part of.

The selected works for the solo show at DAS ESSZIMMER – space for art+ emerge at a meta level what could be perceived as gateways or thresholds between or with-in systems. The discourse, hence occasional specific geopolitical mentioning, lingers on and initiates a process where re-storying takes place and opens up for shared and reflective space and how possibly the in-between stories bring forward agency as the re/de/un do vulnerabilities and introduces a discussion on desire of being connected and how to orchestrate resistance and question what value systems we feed into.

Art thus becomes a site for elasticity, for critical dialogues, for doubt, for attempts for re-establishing a sense of direction or rhythm to un/de/re disengage.

The exhibition project Becoming Landscape is starting our new exhibition season that addresses the manifold changes and upheavals that our societies are confronted with, and which epeatedly necessitate a realignment of strategies and actions. The term of the hour in this context is resilience. – But how do we become resilient?
DAS ESSZIMMER is convinced that only getting involved with the unknown, the unforeseeable can help to think in possibilities and not in problems and thereby alternative modes of action and interaction can be developed. Dealing with art, its methods and ways of thinking provides concepts to continue to act in situations of emptiness, constant change and the lack of stable reference systems.
Artists are therefore the ideal guides in these processes, as they move on unfamiliar territory every day and are used to make decisions on uncertain grounds.

• invitation
• press release

Thanks to:
> City of Bonn
> Sparkasse in Bonn
> the Swedish Embassy in Berlin