Annika Larsson - STRANGE POWERS: Stockholm

Andréhn-Schiptjenko is proud to announce Annika Larsson’s solo exhibition STRANGE POWERS. On November 18, an artist talk was held between Larsson and Marti Manen (curator and director of Index Foundation, Stockholm), and was followed by an amplification of the work Theremins & Drums by the dancer Frank Koenen. To view the talk and the activation, please scroll down on this page.

Larsson is a pioneer within the field of digital video art and has since the early 2000’s created internationally acclaimed works that have become seminal within its genre. Larsson’s works can be found in several institutional collections and her photo-, video- and computer-based works, installations, and performances have regularly been exhibited in international solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg; ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Fundacion la Caixa, Barcelona; S.M.A.K., Ghent; MACRO, Rome; Fridericianum, Kassel; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bogotá; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. She has also participated in several biennials and festivals, such as 49th Biennale of Venice and Forum Expanded – 61st Berlin International Film Festival, and has been awarded numerous stipends and awards for her work. From 2018 to 2023 she had a professorship at the HFBK - Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg.

 

The exhibition – STRANGE POWERS - explores the highly sensitive nature of complex systems. Larsson brings together a series of works that through poetic, sonic and filmic interventions embrace the powers of small and unruly forces, asking how they can participate in rethinking the politics of space, time, matter and the unknown. Throughout the exhibition, the colour scheme of red and blue make subtle nods to the theoretical framework of the exhibition and its thematic. The red-foiled windows recall the hues of skies affected by air pollution or the poisonous atmospheres caused by wildfires. Copper phthalocyanine is a blue dye found in many household items, but the raw material can also fill a critical need in the quest for a quantum computer as a magnetic quantum metamaterial.

 

Strange Powers - Prologue is an audio-visual montage that serves as a prelude to a new film-project by Larsson which is circling around quantum computing’s attempts to tame its strange nature, while still exploiting it. By following the complex entanglements of quantum computing technology - from material extraction, toxic tailings and environmental exhaustion - the video builds up a non-linear story full of multiple connections, meanings, and pathways. Expanding the audio-visual montage, the exhibition also presents object, assemblages, photo-montages and drawings from the research for the work.

 
Playing with aspects of quantum phenomena such as superposition (of being at two places at the same time), entanglement and interference, Strange Powers - Prologue also extends into the room where it is accompanied by the works Theremins & Drums and Fuzzy Speakers. Similar to the "canary in the coal mine”, or other sentinel species and detecting machines, the two aforementioned works are fragile systems with sensors beyond the human. This gives them both the ability to detect potential dangers, as well as to show us the interconnection between currents, fields, bodies and matter.

 

The sound installation Theremins & Drums consists of three room sized theremins and an arrangement of interconnected sounding and vibrating metal drums. Invented initially as a gas detector by Leon Theremin around 1917, the theremin was one of the first instruments that produced sounds entirely electronically. Making use of the body’s interference with the electromagnetic field in proximity to the antennas, the instrument is capable of picking up weak, inaudible signals generated by movement from the body and amplifying them so that it can be played as a hearable sound.

 

In the work Fuzzy Speakers, recordings of bird chirps are played through a thin, fuzzy, copper coil, that similar to a conventional loudspeaker converts electrical energy into sound energy by interacting with a magnet and a membrane. In contrast to a conventional speaker, it does not produce an exact sound of the recording but invites interference to become part of the hearable sound.

 

- Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature

“Microevents rumble through microinhabitations. Their sensory effects barely break the surface of human perception.”

- Elizabeth A. Povinelli

 

Annika Larsson (b. 1972 Stockholm, lives and works in Berlin) works mainly with time-based media. Her work examines the entangled relationship between power, knowledge, embodiment, affect and visuality within our digital and physical worlds. Engaged with the potential of (human and non-human) queer performativity, she is interested in gestures, affects, rituals and actions, as well as patterns of behaviour that obscure or challenge power structures.

 

Between 2018-2022, Annika Larsson led the artistic research project NON-KNOWLEDGE, LAUGHTER & THE MOVING IMAGE. The project was funded by the Swedish Research Council and done in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the HFBK - Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg. In 2023, a publication on the research will be released together with Archive Books.