Flat Octopus – In Open Studio & The Exhibition Case
Open Studio
Projectrooms, Färgfabriken
Ongoing
The Exhibition Case
The Boutique, Färgfabriken
The artist- and curator-run collective Flat Octopus were guests in Färgfabriken´s Open Studio in connection to the exhibition Symbiosis (autumn 2021). During the Open Studio-period they installed The Exhibition Case in the art hall´s boutique, where curators in the network present selected artists in miniature exhibitions in a glass monter.
The Exhibition Case
The Exhibition Case is an ongoing collaboration involving Färgfabriken and Flat Octopus, where curators from the collective exhibit artists fit heir work within the dimensions of a 60x60x60 cm glass case.
Amanda Selinder
Amanda Selinder’s Myceliated (2022) is a site specific installation which visualises the usually invisible endophytic fungi through an artistic work based in scientific method. In the piece, Selinder invites us to take part in the life cycle of pigment producing organisms living within the tissue of trees and asks us to open up our senses to the existence and processes of unseen life forms. Curator: Paulina Granat
Maria Nordsø Lundberg
Memory (2020) Is an unspoken remains of a past experience, a silent mark from deep inside the artist who has found a way to make her voice heard in art. Maria Nordsø Lundberg is Swedish/Danish sculptor, sound artist and singer, educated at Holbæk Kunsthøjskole, China Academy of Fine Arts i Hangzhou, China, and Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm. Curator Juanma Gonzáles
Filippa Wikner
Filippa Wikner (born 1989, Fjärås, Sweden) graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2018. She lives and works in Stockholm and is a part of the studio collective Östermalmskontoret in Axelsberg. In her art she uses metaphors as a container of fictions, myths and propaganda. Curator Juanma Gonzáles
Jesper Thour
A Little Landscape of Smaller Things (2021) is a micro world of micro passions. A hunter, a monkey and a lion cast in a glass theatre fitting for the drama of small-mindedness. The hunter, obsessed with killing the lost monkey on the loose – in his mind a threatening character of chaos and novelty endangering his existence, eyes on the prey, finger on the trigger but unaware of more pressing dangers. The lion lurking around, the explosion in the background, the world falling apart. Curator Alice Máselníková
Gabriella Novak
Gabriella Novak (b. 1982) lives and works in Stockholm. She uses different kinds of robots and machines for creating Hon använder olika typer av robotar och maskiner to create big scaled art works. The are often presented while the are creating together with the artist during performances. Novaks mainly interest in art intresse Is to expand new techniques in painting and to explore the limits of the human body. Curator Alice Máselníková
Open Studio program
During autumn 2021 Flat Octopus curated a program with invited artists.
Saturday 18 September
‘Goodbye limb, hello limb!’
Gabriella Novak as a part of ‘Exhibition Case: Lövholmsbrinken 1’
Vernissage: 18 September 13.00–17.00
Saturday–Sunday 18–19 September
‘Tales of the Owl Woman”
Installation and performance by David Heikkinen, Ida Lod and Andrej Zverev
“I am the rising widow. I am the Owl Woman. I come with messages of change and I ask you to honor the unseen.”
The Owl Woman is a poetic and musical oracle living in the borderlands between life and death. She welcomes you to join her interactive performance-rituals in her own private waiting room.
Ida Lod – song, violin, text, performance
Andrej Zverev – scenography, installation
David Heikkinen – sound composition, live-electronics
Performance: Saturday 18 September 16.00. Sunday 19 September 13.00 and 15.00.
24–26 September
Reverse Studio Visit with Susan Whitlow
Opening hours:
24 September 14.00–17.00; 25–26 September 12.00–16.00
Talk: Sunday 26 September 13.00–13.30 (in Swedish)
24–25 September
Sound and walk workshop by Jacek Smolicki
‘The Lake that Glimmers like Fire’ (Performance): 24 September, 16.00
‘Listening and soundwalking through time, space and technologies’ (Workshop): 25 September, 11.00
1–3 October
Reverse Studio Visit with Christine D. Helweg-Larsen
Opening hours:
1 October 14.00–17.00, 2–3 Oct 12.00–16.00
Talk: Friday 1 October, 16.00–17.00 (in English)
13–17 October
Supermarket 2021 Satellite exhibition with Fanny Arnesen, Malin Cederlund and Aeji Seo supported by Glasgow School of Art. Curated by Flat Octopus and Aeji Seo.
Opening hours:
Wednesday–Thursday 13–14 October: 11.00–16.00
Saturday–Sunday 16–17 October: 11.00–17.00
Friday 15 October 12.00–22.00:
Supermarket 2021 satellite exhibition day
The exhibition is open + live concert by Rotem Geffen @ 20.00
About the artists invited in Open Studio
Fanny Arnesen
Fanny Arnesen (b. 1996) is a Swedish artist currently based in Glasgow. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking in 2020. Her practice stems from an exploration of the natural landscape and the emotion it evokes, with a primary focus on trees. Through oil painting with a predominantly darker colour palette she tries to emphasise the beauty that lies within the eerie aspects of the forest. She has taken part in a group exhibition with Tatha Gallery in Fife and is also selected to exhibit with RSA New Contemporaries in Edinburgh in 2022.
https://www.artsy.net/artist/fanny-arnesen
Malin Cederlund
Malin Cederlund (b. 1992) is an artist born in Visby, Sweden. Her practice is based upon an investigation of the human relationship with the natural landscape, a subject she explores through the medium of oil painting and sculpture. In 2020 she graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art – Painting and Printmaking. Since then she has moved back to Sweden and is now based on her home island Gotland. She was selected to exhibit with RSA New Contemporaries in Edinburgh in 2022.
www.malincederlund.com
Aeji Seo
Aeji Seo is a Korean artist and curator. Seo graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2020 with a BA First Class. She works predominantly with installation, addressing the notion of cultural differences, coexistence and identity politics. She has exhibited widely and curated shows ‘Dialogue of failed Language’, SaltSpace, Glasgow (2020), ‘Goose Feather Blanket’, Wasps Hanson Street, Glasgow (2020), Gabriel Phipps and Aeji Seo, Rogart Street Campus, Glasgow (2019), and ‘Butterfly Effect’, OXO Tower, London (2018). Forthcoming curatorial project ‘Wunderkammer’ includes co-curating the exhibition ‘Vertical Stance’ at Flat Octopus @ Färgfabriken, Stockholm.
Rotem Geffen (musical band)
Singer, pianist, and composer Nelly Klayman-Cohen, using the moniker Rotem Geffen, adds both refined and ruffled edges to her dreamy world of experimental pop. Rotem Geffen’s debut record, You Guard the Key, draws from the playful sensibilities of stripped-down, piano-driven songwriting and free jazz wrapped in the dark, aromatic undercurrents of the surreal. She plays piano and sings in English and Hebrew, together with Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet, bass clarinet), Vilhelm Bromander (double bass), and Milton Öhrström (synth, clarinet, vibraphone, organ). The debut record You Guard the Key is out on the 1st of October on Zeon Light. It will be released on vinyl, cassette and digitally. Pre-order: https://zeonlight.bandcamp.com/album/you-guard-the-key
https://soundcloud.com/rotem-geffen/
Jacek Smolicki
Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and soundwalker. His works bring historical, critical and ethical dimensions to recording practices and technologies in diverse contexts. He is currently a postdoc researcher at Linköping University exploring the history and prospects of soundwalking and field recording practices from the perspective of media arts, environmental humanities, and philosophy of technology. He is also an associate scholar at the Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University. He has exhibited internationally and recently co-founded the Walking Festival of Sound, a transdisciplinary event focusing on the creative and critical potential of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings.
www.smolicki.com
Christine D. Helweg-Larsen
Christine D. Helweg Larsen (b. 1986, Denmark) is a visual artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Helweg-Larsen works with different time-based media and devices and combines them with different materials. She is broadly interested in time, interfaces and transference. Examples of this could be to display Chernobyl’s radioactive clouds invisibility, listening to digital images of women and finding links between geological signs and a secret base for the Danish military during the Cold War. Last year she started to invite the human body into her practice. Helweg-Larsen is currently in the final year of her MFA at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
David Heikkinen
David Heikkinen is a musician and sound creator living in Stockholm. His music moves through empty spaces, stillness, rich harmonies and pulsating rhythms in a collage-like blend of electronic soundscapes, samples and improvisations. In recent years he participated frequently in various collaborations with artists and performers in Sweden, Norway, Italy, Russia, Georgia, and Germany. David is educated at Malmö Academy of Music and Elektronmusikstudion EMS.
Ida Lod
Ida Lod is a musician, performer and educator who primarily works in interdisciplinary and cross disciplinary settings. Through song, words, violin, movement and various ways of interaction with her surroundings she explores the connection between inner and outer worlds. Dadaistic Diva, Food of Love, Ofelia Reversed and Owl Woman are examples of some of her own productions where masking and demasking are continuous explorations. As an educator Ida focuses on inspiring people to find their own creative voice through embodied voice-practices. Ida lives in Stockholm and was educated at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.
www.idalod.com
Andrej Zverev
Andrej Zverev (b. 1974, Kutaisi, Georgia) is based in Stockholm. He works with painting, sculpture, printmaking, installations and performance. Zverev’s artistic practice explores the interplay between objects and audiences. In his installations he has experimented with the imagined object through displacing its purpose, in order to challenge the viewer’s perception and create contrasts and paradoxes. Zverev’s paintings evoke emotions and sensations of objects as well as previously experienced events, recurring through dreams.
www.andrejzverev.com
Susan Whitlow
Susan Whitlow (born 1989) is a Stockholm-based artist working with drawing and large-scale painting. She is interested in how to transfer motion into stillness and enable the eye and body to perceive the imprint of a movement more closely. The eye’s and body’s perception of their surroundings is never limited to a defined framework, taking in more than what is right in front of it. Likewise do the colours, the paint and motives of Whitlow’s paintings and drawings seem to grow beyond the borders of the canvas or paper and contain overlapping thoughts and sights, always in motion.
https://www.susanwhitlow.com/
Gabriella Novak
Gabriella Novak (born in Poland) lives and works in Stockholm. She uses different types of robots and machines to create large-scale works. Her robots are often presented when creating live performances. Novak’s main interest in art is expanding new painting techniques and in exploring boundaries of the human body.
www.gabriellanovak.com
Related
Flat Octopus is an international artist- and curator-run collective in Stockholm, started in 2019. It consists of seven people with different professional and cultural backgrounds.Flat Octopus organises exhibitions in different apartments located in Stockholm, as well as external collaborations and projects. Flat Octopus are: Edit Fándly, Juanma González, Paulina Granat, Amr Hamid, Alice Máselníková, Franziska Sperling and Erik Wijkström.
www.flatoctopus.com
Färgfabriken’s ongoing project Open Studio was launched 2017 in collaboration with the art and design group Very Very Gold. Open studio is a way of giving exposure to creative thinking and creative processes before they adopt their final form, while also bringing creators and audiences closer together.
With support from
Stockholm stad och Glasgow School of Art