Children of the Children of the Revolution

Group exhibition
Main hall, Färgfabriken, and outdoor

Curator Jonatan Habib Engqvist

Participating artists: Signe Johannessen, Joanna Lombard, Lina Selander, Ylva Snöfrid, Nikolina Ställborn

The spring and summer exhibition at Färgfabriken takes takes it’s point of departure in the past to talk about contemporary times. The exhibition takes place exactly 50 years after the now symbolic spring of 1968, and it reflects both historical events and the time we live in now.

What are the personal consequences of utopia? Is it possible to create a temporary community without it leading to isolation? The exhibition brings together artists from a generation who share a common experience. They are all, in different ways, children of idealists, grown up in “alternative” left-wing environments under the so-called green wave in the 1970s and early 1980s. They are children of a generation who wanted to create a different way of life. These artists learned early in life to decode the alternative norm, and through art it became possible for them to express it’s complexity.

You could say that this is an existential, or even biodynamic exhibition: a composition of the Greek bios [life] and dynamis [force, energy]. The simple idea is to establish a perspective that informs and puts their art in a new context, while highlighting something that we all have in common. Perhaps this means that both the painful and the beautiful from the artist’s upbringing can emerge into a new light.

The artists are now well-established and belong to a generation of parents who face a double desire – they know what it means to be at once outside and part of a society, and can relate to both conventional and alternative norms.

About the artists

Signe Johannessen (1978)

Signe Johannessen’s work questions the notion of life, power structures and morality. Often departing from her own experiences, she aims at connecting tangible everyday dilemmas with science fiction-like worlds. Factual and fictional evolutionary breakthroughs tell us something about where we are heading. Johannessen is interested in how we write about the history of nature and portray other species. Johannessen’s work interrogates what our relationship with other species can tell us about power structures. Looking into the history, as well as the interpretations of nature, animals, and artificial machines, her work invokes Donna Haraway’s call: “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with”, and discusses what it means to be human. Johannessen studied at Oslo National College of the Arts in Norway and the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. She makes sculptures, videos, drawings and installations. Johannessen’s artistic processes often evolve through workshops and excursions in collaborations with various experts. Johannessen is one of the founders of Art Lab Gnesta, a self-organized institution in the country-side south of Stockholm.

Joanna Lombard (1972)

Joanna Lombard’s artistry is characterized by a mix of studies of the personal and the universal contrasted with utopias and reality. Through photography, audio works and video installations, Lombard stages scenes with a theatrical expression – scenes and excisions from contexts that, like much else in her artistry, are based on personal experiences and on exploration of a bygone era. In 2016, the book Ljusbacken was published, as a continuation of her study of the collective and the site Ljusbacken. It serves as a kind of backdrop for Lombard’s storytelling. Lombard is educated at, among others, Konstfack and Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and has had exhibitions in many different places around the world over the years as well as participated in the Momentum Biennale 2015; SeMA Biennale; Mediacity Media Art Biennale, South Korea and The Black Moon, Palais de Tokyo.

Lina Selander (1973)

Lina Selander has been described as a poetic filmmaker, political narrator and researcher as well as an innovative film artist. In her process, witch consists of an extensice collection of material – of image, sound, text and voice – Selander builds up her artworks in something that could be described as an archaeological or geological archive where different layers of meaning and history cross each other, are joined together and stored but where the gaps and displacements between them are also constantly present. Selander is interested in the breaking points of history and her films orient around both historical, prehistorical and mythological sources; they are moving both horizontally and vertically in time, as in an inevitable, unanswered desire to understand the incomprehensible that appears in the poetic montage. Selander is educated at The Roal institute of Art (Kungliga Konsthögskolan) in Stockholm and at Valand Academy in Gothenburg. Selander contributed at Manifesta (Genk, Belgium) in 2012 and has represented Sweden at the Venice biennial in 2015

Ylva Snöfrid (1974)

Ylva Snöfrid* has since an early age developed a distinctive artistic language and her own world of motifs, characterized by personal mythologies and based on subjective experiences. She uses the language of painting to create her own spaces, on the border between art and reality, where she explores mental, psychological and philosophical understandings of time and place. Ylva Snöfrid often builds installations, and stages ritualistic performances, as a form of activism. Ylva Snöfrid grew up in an artistic and political environment, and became acquainted with film and art history early in life. Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev, about the Russian icon painter Ivan Rublev, and about art and the artist’s stipulations affected her deeply and influenced her already as a child to make the decision to become an artist. Ylva Snöfrid is active internationally, based in Stockholm and Athens.

* The artist Ylva Snöfrid was formally known as Ylva Ogland. Her name was Ylva Snöfrid and her surname Ogland. Since early childhood, Ylva has lived with the idea that Snöfrid was a mirror twin, with its own persona, who lived in the mirror world. For many years, artist Ylva Ogland has recalled Snöfrid from the mirror world into the real world through rituals, substances, paintings and big marionette puppets. As a consequence of this artistic process, Ylva and Snöfrid have finally transmuted into one, the artist and the artistry is one – Ylva Snöfrid.

Nikolina Ställborn (1972)

Nikolina Ställborn works with the creation of atmospheres and situations, witch often results in installations of sculptures in combination with light. In public space installations, both permanent and temporary, as well as in exhibitions or other environments, she is attentive towards the whole, including context and space. Ställborn has made public artworks in Iceland and Sweden, among others in Hendriksdalsallén in Stockholm. She has also made less public, more inaccessible, almost secret installations, recently in the Hagströmer library at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Throughout her work process Ställborn visualises her in depth studies in biology, medical science and the history of medicine in different ways, highlighting individual organisms and the systems they are part of. Nikolina Ställborn is educated at the Icelandic Collage of Art and Crafts in Reykjavík and has a Master of Fine Art from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She also has a background in analogue photography.

Exhibition catalogue

Buy the exhibition catalogue in Färgfabriken’s art shop or download a digital version (PDF).
Digital version of the catalogue Children of the Children of the Revolution

Supported by

Stockholms stad
The culture administration, Stockholm County Council
Swedish Arts Council