Haggen, Patrik: SURPLUS WORK: THE NON/DISPLAY OF SWEDISH LABOR MOMENT ART

Artwork from the archive of the Swedish Building Workers' Union in Folket Hus and new work by Leonor Serrano Rivas (Spain)

For the last 10 years, Demonstration, a 8x7 meter painting by Albin Amelin that hangs in the congressional hall of Stockholm's Folkets Hus, has been covered by a white curtain while awaiting relocation. This painting is one of many pieces of art produced for or in solidarity with the Swedish Labor Movement. Made in popular aesthetic forms, these artworks were visual manifestations of a working class identity, offered through public and mass distribution. The use value of the art of the labor movement has been subject to a radical change as its institutions have been redefined and restructured. Like Demonstration, many artworks have been similarly concealed from public view behind curtains or unceremoniously stacked in basements. Why this act of concealment: is it because of the fear of the power that these works might hold or do they no longer have any power at all? Or is there something more sinister at work in the politics of obscuring this history?

Guided by the assertion that an artwork is affected by its place and mode of reception, this exhibition investigates both the removal of these artworks and questions their value now that they are stripped of an audience and their ideological function. The exhibition itself will consist of a series of gestures and traces of this condition: a stack of paintings removed from the basement of Gothenburg's Folkets Hus; a reproduction of the curtain covering Demonstration; and a new site-specific installation by Spanish contemporary artist and architect Leonor Serrano Rivas based on the curators' research.

The curtain and the loaned paintings illustrate recent conditions for reception of the Swedish Labor Movement artworks. Though concealment and storage are modes of non display, new strategies of display must relate to these conditions. One strategy applies an hierarchy of value by referring to inherent qualities of composition and material. A different approach, however, may yet again focus ways of distribution. The lack of purpose and meaning that many works are subjected to can perhaps inspire an archive in the active sense that seeks meaning through actualization.

For this exhibition, Leonor Serrano Rivas will connect the different places where the paintings have been shown and archived, and alter the spatial and temporal components of the individual works. Serrano proposes a Matryoshka doll-like game in real scale by building a new space based on the Folket Hus in Gothenburg and Stockholm, as well as sites referenced in the paintings. This fictional space will be represented in 1:1 scale maps on the gallery floor that involves the whole space. In addition, she will present photographs presenting a staged view of the archive where she has relocated the objects taken from the paintings into new industrial spaces.

Curated by Cecilia Eriksen Wijk (Sweden), Marta Peleteiro Ramallo (Spain) Michaela Nilsson (Sweden), Patrik Haggren (Sweden)
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Conversation with Patrik Haggen
In our curatorial process we focused in the beginning on the architecture and the environment in which the Labour Movement art works have belonged. As the work progressed we also became more interested in the paintings. And you were involved at an early stage, taking part of our research and the project's development. Your work in the exhibition reflects on both of these aspects, the places of distribution of the artworks as well as the works themselves. I would like you to say something about what interested you about the project on a conceptual level.

Well, when it was proposed to work with you, it was under unusual conditions, with me not being a resident of Sweden and having to work with a file completely unknown to me until that moment. You supplied me with all the information that I had, of your stories, narratives and photographs of the places of the file, along with the historical details as well as the paintings themselves. I had to work from a long distance away and in a way, you were my eyes; I decided then that these conditions instead of being disadvantageous would be key factors in my project.
The process in which we accidentally found ourselves was awesome. From the beginning, we entered into the project not realising it is a game of representation and interpretation, where I was the second or the third link in the chain. Therefore, from the first moment, this process led to the ideas from the original files being contaminated. It was from this that I decided to work in a very clear way with the fiction, establishing a framework, with some rules of the game in order to bring together the provided material to establish my own narrative.
Then, my concerns that led and structured a large part of my response to the work and process were the following: How to work in such a short time period with a completely unknown file? , How to build narrations from stories I have not experienced first hand, only from your photos and short stories? ...

You could say it was only a personal and exhaustive interpretation and it is fair to say that I established some guidelines that I tried to be true to, but there could have been others set.

Your work for the exhibition consisted of two parts, one was a scale 1:1 map that you drew on the floor and the walls of the gallery. This map was composed out of several different spaces. Please explain what spaces they were and how you assembled them. I would also like you to talk about the use of full scale. It is very interesting to me because we thought a lot about these places of display as places were the artworks met with the life of the working class. The works had a use value in which form served the purposes of content, but at the same time the entire project of distribution was kind of avant-garde. We wanted to think about the gallery in relation to this. What you did was to project one space on top of another.

Lately I've been reflecting on the work of art as an art object, as a free element that is simply placed into an exhibition space. I worry about this independence of the object as it can lead to it being linked as a consumer product or a purely decorative work. In our case, as we worked on the installation, the exhibition space of the work would be as important as where the file was contained.

As a starting point it raised the possibility of connecting places by changing elements of time and space. To escape the neutrality of the white box, another entire space was created -  that could host parallel narratives: it was an attempt to set the scene to introduce new frames.

In this first part of the project I propose a site-specific exercise where the work is done solely for the place where it will be displayed, in fact it is the key factor. How do I do this? The idea was to create a set of Matryoshka dolls in a disturbed way, where three spaces are superimposed on a 1:1 scale with the exhibition space being the last one. Disturbed, simply because they hold the scale and the spatial limit is given by the exhibition hall only as the last container.

I try to build this new space from the stores and warehouses of Gothenburg Folket Hus (the store that contains the two revised paintings which were then brought together with others in the exhibition). Also, we used the hall of Folket Hus in Stockholm (hidden behind a curtain which is reproduced for the exhibition, one of the most significant works of the painter Albin Amelin movement, of 1937) - and finally another attached store, the place where the pictures I took, for the second part of the exhibition.

This overlapping of the spaces was developed by accident, because as I said before, I worked from a distance and used the information you sent me every two or three days. Thus, the new data, new photos and drawings in relation to the file appeared almost simultaneously.

I found it interesting that this accumulation, this exercise to superimpose and then interlace and order could open the possibility of working with a future space (now created by the accumulation) rather than past spaces: those that had contained the file.

The second part of your work for the exhibition where two installations that to me functioned as a perpatual displacement of the content and spaces - both of display and non display - of the Labor Movement Art. Using sculpture and photography you were able to take elements of the paintings and put them elsewhere, in an industrial space that I think reminded you of the archive space in a sort of flux that we had found, while showing documentation of this alongside these elements in your installation. There was also the lighting and your use of theatricality. I would be very interesting to have your thoughts on this redistribution of the artworks, and the strong staging or framing of them in the exhibition. Can it be contrasted to the use of full scale for the drawings that more create the gallery space itself? 

Indeed, in this second part of the project I tried to reflect on the representation. I focused very directly on the file itself, the paintings. I started reviewing a number of specific paintings that we had access to more directly, I chose two of a possible five. The reason? More subjective than objective issues. The intention was clear: to give a new reading, a retelling of a story done years before.

The paintings had been hidden, and what they wanted to represent originally, had fallen into oblivion. Thus, the store rooms were the only privileged witnesses to the hidden canvases and pictures from day to day.
When I started working I had only a couple of pictures, so I focused on the composition of the scene, the elements that appeared in it, colours, and shapes. It was a very intuitive process. I wanted to give a reading of my own, a specific interpretation. The idea was to start a chain of transformation of stories, like in a game of Chinese whispers, you say the same message from one person to another person, but it always varies.
As a first rule of the game of representation and reproduction it would change one pictorial scene to another, of similar composition represented photographically. I needed to reconstruct certain elements of the scene. It had to be a story of its own, so I analyzed each one of the objects. I knew that it was reviewing but not copying or moving directly from painting to sculpture, so I made certain changes.

Flags, slogans and phrases of political content were the elements that made ​​up the first scene. Based on the painting of Fanor Över Bron, which the title and exact year of completion were unfortunately unknown. The flags were built from fragments of other flags and phrases of political content were transcribed backwards by hand; becoming confused symbols and data.
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The second painting of Kitteinonen was composed of a city landscape. The houses were shown on paper and abstracted in colour and form, passing them from a specific system, a particular landscape to a series of possible generic buildings for any city.