Photo: Signe Johannessen
May 7, 2022, 12-16
Artists: Cara Tolmie and Julia Giertz, Emmeli Person, Sara Ekholm Eriksson
Curator: Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris together with Art Lab Gnesta
Welcome to a day about water and wetlands at Art Lab Gnesta! We are inaugurating our new pond and three new works of art in our greenhouse. The artist Emmeli Person performs live, the limnologist Mia Svedäng lectures on the human desire to tame water and the artist Sara Ekholm Eriksson and the entomologist Emma Wahlberg take us on an inventory among the brewery island’s smallest inhabitants.
In defining an internal body of water for the art space, the newly formed rain-fed waterbody of Art Lab Gnesta will be a site for the contemplation and care of bodies of water, as simultaneously internal and embodied, and also planetary and porous.
The new waterbody located in the greenhouse is a shared site for acts of ingestion, embodiment and taking residence in the waters. To celebrate this the exhibition high tide fine line shares four contemporary artists who perform a series of immersions, submerging and emerging. These are acts of lingering watery methods towards locating the tides in the room, and in turn the tides of the planetary.
At the generosity of Art Lab Gnesta, each of the artists have undertaken residencies within the Lab, and have each produced newly commissioned pieces for this inauguration of the new waterbody.
Artist Emmeli Person performs live at the inauguration of the waterbody in her newly commissioned performance work which renders choral voices into reflections of water as an archive and memory holder, which both stores and stories.
Artist Cara Tolmie draws on her haunting Internal Singing practice, and in collaboration with artist Julia Giertz, together contribute a newly made sound sculpture that resonates with the waterbody as a practice of reverberation, singing and contracting.
Artist Sara Ekholm Eriksson works with local natural scientist Emma Wahlberg to investigate the inscriptions of local insects and Sara then transcribes these more-than-human mark makings as stone intrusions into the permanent design of the waterbody, scribbling deep time matters into the soaked stones.
Curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris has invited these four watery artists to enact the ritual of inaugurating the new waterbody of Art Lab Gnesta. This is part of her continuing curatorial focus on the hydrological manifestations of art in the climate crisis and her curatorial theory of the Hydrocene where she argues for the vitality of artistic methods of collaborating with water.
During the day, Mia Svedäng, limnologist (freshwater ecologist) and expert on freshwater at the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, will talk about how we humans have always tried to control and “tame” the water – by damming, ditching, channeling and culverting it. She also talks about why it is so important that water can once again take its place in society and the landscape – for the sake of the climate, biodiversity and our own sake. Together we step down into Frösjön water to investigate the life that lives there.
Program
12-13 Serving of nettle soup and wild herb tea
13 Talk by Mia Svedäng
13.30 Inauguration of the pond
14.00 Sara Ekholm Eriksson talks about her work, then entomological inventory together with Emma Wahlberg
15.00 Performance Emmelie Person