The SLASK 2024 group show opened on 27 November with seven artists, and through the first week of December we posted its labels one work a day: tyres, aluminium, stoneware, silver, clay and tape.
What Now? Again!, the SLASK 2024 group show, opened on 27 November: seven artists across sculpture, jewellery, textile, video and painting. Through the first week of December we published its labels one work a day, an advent calendar of materials, and read together they still make the best walkthrough of the show.
Alexandra Moreno’s A Knot In Motion (discarded car tyres, epoxy, stainless steel, 2024) draws on posthumanist perspectives and Donna Haraway’s idea that the world is a knot in motion: in an intricately linked world, harming one part means harming yourself. The work was commissioned by Svensk Däckåtervinning.
Douglas Tillberg’s Berlocker (aluminium, found objects, 2024) came with the shortest artist text of the month, in translation: I see something. I take my nail, push it straight through. That is my charm. Amanda Edstrand’s Hysteria (aluminium, video, photography, 2024) traces a lineage in one sentence: the seventeenth century witch becomes the hysteric of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who today has become the twenty first century’s female borderline patient.
Rokko Bengts’ Seaside stroke simulation (cotton, polyester, linen, faux leather, 2023) is a snapshot of the archipelago through a disoriented lens. Anna Harström’s small group of stoneware sculptures (2022 to 2024) collects spirals and spikes, forms out of classical architecture and from everywhere in nature; her label offered three quiet facts: three legs never wobble, clay mixed with chalk becomes glaze, and objects can be charged with protective energies, if you believe in such things. Natali Ringqvist showed Untitled (postcards, clay, tape, 2024) and Chausu painting (clay, tempera emulsion, linen canvas, 2024), captioned only with a set of coordinates: 37°07’29.9”N 139°57’52.6”E.
In Main (silver, zircons, copper, 2024), Johanna Edwardh wants to challenge and preserve the craft at once, setting the goldsmith’s slow, careful process against the fast production of our ultramodern world.
A week into December the gallery moved on, with a Slask vernissage with Anna Ofelia Johansson on 4 December. The four weeks, four exhibitions form arrived a year later; the habit of handing December over to many hands began here.
