Foto: Evelina Jonsson
September 20 – November 2
Opening Saturday, September 20, 12-4 p.m.
Art Lab Gnesta presents an exhibition that lifts the lid on other worlds. Based on desert landscapes, open plains and confined spaces, places are created where thoughts can fall freely.
Sånt som faller is a contemplative exhibition where immersive environments invite the viewer to reflect on the interaction between nature, humans and history. Here the visitor encounters rooms that touch on questions of existence and humanity’s place in the world.
Evelina Jonsson‘s (born in Nässjö 1990) monumental installation Sånt som faller is based on everyday plastic boxes from Clas Ohlson – but in her hands they are transformed into small, surreal microworlds. Inside, living and changing ecosystems grow, filled with plants, insects, objects and sculptures. Everyday boxes become aquariums or museum display cases, artificial worlds that both illuminate and reinforce the distance between humans and their surroundings.
The installation blurs the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, and at the same time carries a sense of discomfort and melancholy. In the boxes, the world takes on new life: new trees sprout from rotting apples, earthworms build ecosystems, and sculptures of giant flies slowly break down into dust. Are these traces of a dead world – or the beginning of a new one?
At Art Lab Gnesta, a new iteration of the work, which has been in a constant state of dissolution since 2021, is presented, evoking an experience that is both engaging and distant. Her artistic practice revolves around materiality, gathering and entropy – where the pursuit of clarity is always combined with dissolution and loss of control.
In the next room, artist and hypnotherapist Samara Sallam (born in Damascus 1991), educated visual artist, journalist and hypnotherapist, is presented. Her artistry explores existence and the place of man in the world by confronting violence, trauma and transition.
Through multi-layered narratives, Sallam examines the intersections between language, biopolitics, psyche and storytelling. Her artistry is often characterized by interactivity – they only come into being when the audience touches, eats or moves them, thus completing the idea. The works at Art Lab Gnesta are characterized by strong symbolism, such as language in dissolution, desolate desert landscapes and a dead bird, and lead the viewer towards other levels of consciousness.
In Art Lab Gnesta’s newly renovated smaller exhibition room, she shows a newly produced sculpture – a fallen bird whose insides are not in the room. At the same time, the language in the video Sacred Internet in Climatime (2021) – created in collaboration with the American artist Kate Sterchi – rises into the sky.
During Gnesta Bokdagar, Saturday 18 October, Sallam will talk with an invited guest about her work and her artist’s book The Ghoul’s Abode.
Together, Evelina Jonsson and Samara Sallam will show two artworks that consciously transfer control from the artist’s hands to the viewer – and to the world that surrounds the works.
September 20 – November 2
Opening Saturday, September 20, 12-4 p.m.
On September 20, 12-4 p.m., Art Lab Gnesta will open the exhibition Sånt som fall with Evelina Jonsson and Samara Sallam. At the same time, we will be offering apple pressing during the day and an art workshop for all ages from 12:00-4:00 p.m. Free admission.