Peter Hagdahl - Liquids: Stockholm

Andréhn-Schiptjenko is proud to inaugurate 2013 with Peter Hagdahl’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. 

Hagdahl (b 1956) is since the early 1990’s one of Sweden’s most acclaimed artists working with digital and new media. He was Professor of Art and New Media at The Royal College of Art, Stockholm 1999-2009 and has since then been a research fellow and guest professor at the Department of Computer and Systems sciences at the University of Stockholm. His work reached a very large audience in 2012 with the inauguration or the public commission Liquid Sky, one of Europe’s largest interactive LED-installations, in the outdoor ceiling of Stockholm Mood.

Influence, change and transformation are key concepts in Hagdahl’s work. The seminal work Sustained (1992), an installation where sculpture, painting, drawings, snapshots, newspaper clippings and a mobile power supply formed a web of different forces and their interconnections, succeeded in relating global oil trade to the digestive systems of a single individual (as illustrated by President Bush’s gastric flu).

The possibility to visualise change is continuously fascinating to Hagdahl and he has rigorously pursued projects that in varying ways investigate both material and immaterial processes. In Liquids, Hagdahl returns to an exhibition scenography that has become a classic in his œuvre, with a long sculpture placed close to the floor that intersects the space and acts a point of departure for numerous images and objects – sculpture, projected images and animations, painting, works on paper and photography.
Liquids deals with changes and transformations of emotions and states of mind within individuals as well as within larger communities. The apparently stable is transformed into the ephemeral and the volatile, thus question this very dichotomy. Liquids simultaneously explores and exposes the construction of complex systems, systems that in turn reflect connections and interdependencies of contemporary society.