Hilda Hellwig Nothing is the same again
Solo exhibition
Project rooms, Färgfabriken
Färgfabriken is exhibiting collages by the well-known director Hilda Hellwig, as the third part of the long-term project Psychosis.
Färgfabriken’s project Psychosis is an extensive long-term project intended to illuminate the human psyche trough a series of exhibitions, publications, seminars and film screenings. Hellwig investigate both her own and our collective mind in her work and has a naturally close relation to the Psychosis concept, the investigtion of a human mind.
In addition to her work in theater Hilda Hellwig has also worked with making pictures in the form of collages. Collage is something she has done since childhood, a second path she has followed throughout her life in parallel to her work in the theater. When asked why she never showed them before she replies;
“The people around me have often encouraged me to show them. My work with collage has been a protected area where I didn’t need to be part of some movement, where I didn’t have to define my work.”
Hellwig has a very relaxed relationship to her pictures and doesn’t want to overdramatize their content. She works thematically, in series that treat everything from “an alternative story of Christ” to a history of her own life and absurd dream scenes. At the same time, Hellwig points out that she doesn’t work with political or religious themes. “My collages are not illustrations. I tell stories, create situations, worlds, portraits. It’s fiction and dreams.”
To throw oneself into the imagery of Hilda Hellwig is an intense experience; dreams, hallicunations and fear blends with an absurd humour. Encounters with sharks, whales and human beings in trance – they are all participants in these strange tableaus and bizarre sceneries. They scream, they fly or they just stand there frozen. This cocktail leaves no physical hangover but the images remains, as the viewer falters out of them or float back to the surface. Is this about reversing a mental gravity? Nothing is the same again.
About the artist
Hilda Hellwig helped found the experimental theater scene Teater Aurora, where she also worked as artistic director from 1979 to ’94. Her productions for the Aurora included Könets fångar – en subjective suck (Prisoners of Gender: A Subjective Sigh) among others. Hellwig has worked with several of the most prominent Swedish stages: the Royal Dramatic Theatre, the Stockholm City Theater, the Royal Opera, and recently the Malmö Opera with a production of Carmen. She has also been active abroad with the Swedish Theater in Helsinki, the Norwegian Theater, the National Theater in Oslo, Kantona Jozsef in Budapest, the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, and the Estonian Drama Theater. Since the fall of 2008 Hellwig has been a professor of theater direction on the faculty of the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Catalogue
