DURATIONAL SPACE
PERFORMANCE: 7.3 – 23.3 2024

SIGNE JOHANNESSEN – Holy mare
JENNY BERG – Canary whirl, bakom scenen (Canary Whirl, behind the stage)

With eager enthusiasm, we open the fourth edition of DURATIONAL SPACE on September 19th, featuring two artists who bring heavy-handed sculpture into a dreamlike, poetic visual world in motion. We are proud to present Signe Johannessens’ ”Holy Mare” and Jenny Berg’s ”Canary Whirl,” behind the scenes, two newly produced performance works where the audience can come and go as they please during the three hours the works are in progress.

Signe Johannessen – Holy mare

Signe Johannessens performance Holy Mare takes us down into a baroque tack room where bottomless needs for power, intimacy, and love are tested in relation to the untamed horse on the verge of abuse.

Taming horses has been done in various ways throughout history around the world. What all methods have in common is the use of different types of restraints made of leather, textiles, and metals. The title Holy Mare reminds us of how ”mare” refers to a female horse but also to a mythological female figure used to describe an uncontrollable state, a ”mara.” To be ridden by a ”mara,” as in a nightmare.

In the performance Holy Mare, there’s a form of madness that overshadows the care and nurturing. The ”mara” grows stronger in intervals, like a wave increasing in strength to ultimately rampage freely, then subsides, and the whole cycle begins again.

Johannessen works with a speculative reshaping of hybrid bodies, relationships, historical narratives, and the potential of the posthumous. By combining episodes from her own biography and our shared history, her work renegotiates the sorrow and joy that intimate communities entail between humans and other animals. Concepts like family and kinship are expanded, and our relationship to the rest of nature is constantly present in her work.

Signe Johannessen works with sculpture, video, drawing, and performance. Her artistic processes often evolve through collaboration with other fields of knowledge. In a series of public installations, she has collaborated with Erik Rören as the duo Rören/Johannessen. Signe is one of the founders of Art Lab Gnesta, a self-organized collective and experimental artistic platform located in the countryside of Sörmland, where she still serves as one of the artistic leaders.

Signe is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is currently scheduled to have upcoming solo exhibitions at the Bohuslän Museum, Rønnebæksholm (Denmark), Helgeland Museum (Norway), and a performative presentation at TATE Liverpool (UK). In recent years, she has had solo exhibitions at the Oslo Kunstforening (2023), Örebro Konsthall (2023), Ystad Art Museum (2020), and has participated in group exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Display, Prague (2022); EFA Project Space, New York (2022); Accelerator, Stockholm (2021); and Färgfabriken, Stockholm (2018). 

Jenny Berg – Canary Whirl, bakom scenen
(Canary Whirl, behind the stage)

“I was walking down a street in town with some relatives, we were on our way to the grocery store. It was the 80s, I was walking slightly behind them, and we passed a park and a kiosk. Suddenly, the world dissolved, and there was no longer any difference between my body and anything else. Instead, there was an infinite number of extremely small vibrating threads moving in all directions around each other at an unimaginably high speed. There were no fixed points anywhere; my consciousness was also woven into the movement, part of it. Later, seemingly solid relatives reappeared, kiosks, trees, and asphalt roads. My grandmother’s canary was perched over my right shoulder a hundred meters back and five floors up in its cage in the kitchen (…).”

In Canary Whirl, behind the stage, Jenny Berg stages a central experience, a memory she has tried to materialize many times before. As usual, the chosen materials seem too coarse, the mechanics too clumsy, and the narrative too precisely formulated. A group of theater technicians experiment with glittery effects, set pieces, kiosk owners, and old relatives. They assemble and disassemble the scene, sometimes lovingly and sometimes brutally, in search of something that can resemble what happened.

Jenny Berg works with installations, objects, text and actions that often are parts of non linear sequences of events. The potential that lies within various ways of perceiving reality is a recurring interest in her work. This can involve how solidity and demarcations are experienced or how we touch and are being touched, how we blend into the world. She is interested in wishes that seem too large and what happens to them in an artistic process.

Jenny Berg is a Swedish artist from north of Sweden, she is currently based in Malmö and has studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands. Recent exhibitions include; Arvika konsthall (2024), Konsthallen Trollhättan, Örnsköldsviks konsthall, Ifö Center Bromölla, Galleri 21 and Molekyl Gallery in Malmö and Arvika konsthall.

The performance is kindly Canary whirl, bakom scenen (Canary Whirl, behind the stage) supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee  

PRODUCTION FACTS DURATIONAL SPACE#4
SIGNE JOHANNESSEN – Holy mare
Idea & concept: Signe Johannessen
Performers: Kaisa Malmborg, Faïka Ammar, Selma Kjellsson

JENNY BERG – Canary whirl, behind the stage
Idea & Concept: Jenny Berg
Performers: Mayte Vaos, Thomas Hiljeborn, Helena Ricci, Finon Alkabawi
Gisel Munir Escobar, Dragan Smajovic, Erik Wall, Elisa von Proschwitz, Hendrik Willekens

CURATORS: Elin Lundgren & Petter Pettersson – LILITH ARTIST DUO

With DURATIONAL SPACE, LPS is exploring a new format for the studio, alongside its core activity of large-scale solo performances. The idea is an open and generous display of performance art, where visitors can wander freely and experience two or more separate performances on the same evening. DURATIONAL SPACE opens up the studio and allows us to showcase more artists over a longer period in a form that is closer to an exhibition than a performance.

The format DURATIONAL SPACE was inaugurated in 2022. See video documentation from past events.→ LILITH ARCHIVE

Read more about the artists:
→ jennyberg
→ signejohannessen