Exhibition Text by Karin Lindstén
Artist: Karin Lindstén
Curator: Sarah Rodrigues
Graphic Design: Stelios Chatzivasileiou
9-12 September 2021
Everything noisy happens at the edge of the crack. Close your eyes and you will catch it. Buzzing insects inside out in the night. A slide, then another. Images appear and disappear. Inside a house where no one lives anymore. A memory no one remembers. Hands are stroking the borders of the walls. Inside or in an ocean of ferns. But the house seems to leak. The collapse is always near. Also, images can die. Someone is lying in the grass next to a rock, or a tree. Someone or something is watching. A flashlight creates a temporary stage, or a crime scene. There is a fleeting border of light. An artificial moon is flickering, under the full moon, up in the blue night sky.
In CATCHERS we are placed in a world where perception is altered, an in-between state. There is suspicion and tenderness towards the image and what images do. The sensory body is present, an escape maybe, from the habitual vision of the everyday. The body is in the center and at the periphery all at once, but always in relation to nature and to technology, in different stages of visibility. The face is resistant to being captured, maybe because it is not important here. The blue eyelids are shutters towards the world, protecting the images that are your own. The fantasy of being invisible. To be nothing, or to merge into a larger body, with a sensual vision, where the psyche is not alone and separated from the world. The drone-camera itself is a main character, the performer searching for its own visage. In the projections, in the mirror…can the insects give us a clue? Is it a drone or an insect flying in the night? The death of insects coincides with the illumination of the night sky. Some species can distinguish and follow individual stars, others find their way by reading the entire starry sky as patterns of light. Light pollution makes the night skies brighter, and the navigation more difficult. This is believed to be one of the main reasons for the increasing death of insects.
The colour ‘digital blue’ reappears in several of the works, and in the entrance of the exhibition space. It is the blue colour that is used for making objects disappear in film productions. It is utilized in outdoor environments, where chroma green – which otherwise is often used – doesn’t work. By employing the blue colour things can disappear, be exchanged, and camouflaged.
In an abandoned house remnants of a life are kept in boxes. Time seems to stand still. Objects and images are stored for posterity. The slide projector, the archive of the home, can make it visible again, that which all now living have forgotten. What happens to memories in a world of mass image production and surveillance? CATCHERS moves in this world of loss. A loss of species, persons, and memories, in the ruins of images as we know them.
By Karin Lindstén
Karin Lindstén (b.1994, Linköping) graduated in 2021 from the MFA-program at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. She received a BFA from Malmö Art Academy 2019.