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OLA PEHRSON.
Retrospective.
Ljubljana. Belgrade.
Stockholm.
December 19,
2007 – January 20, 2008
You are
kindly invited to attend the opening of exhibition on
Wednesday, December 19th at 8 p.m. at
Galerija ©kuc.
You are kindly invited to
attend the guided tour
on Thursday, December 20th and on
Tuesday, January 15th at 7 p.m. at Galerija
©kuc.
Galerija ©kuc is the first
venue to show the Ola Pehrson. Retrospective. Ljubljana.
Belgrade. Stockholm., an exhibition that brings together
several of Ola Pehrson’s key works and presents his artistic
practice in Slovenia for the first time.
Ola Pehrson’s oeuvre is
permeated by a strong interest in media, in technology and
in the large scale systems that both form our behavioural
patterns and register our lives. He plays with metaphors and
makes audible and visible powerful forces and structures
that govern us and our societies.
Ola Pehrson gained
considerable international recognition for his latest work,
Hunt for the Unabomber, a bizarre recreation of an
American 30-minute documentary about the terrorist Theodore
Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. A doctor and former
professor in mathematics, Kaczynski carried out a bomb
campaign with the aim to attract attention to what he saw as
the erosion of human freedom, caused by modern technology
and large-scale organization. Alluding to the thinking and
methods of Kaczynski, Ola Pehrson re-created each scene in
the documentary by hand, using play dough, paint, pieces of
cardboard and trash. He personally acted out all the
included interviews and carefully re-filmed each scene in
the right order. The result is surprisingly close to the
original and as Ola have stated in earlier interviews, “it
is no less authentic”.
Amongst Ola Pehrson’s earlier
works is Desktop, a 10:1 scale model of a Windows 95
screenshot. Dating from the same year is Yucca Invest
Trading Plant, where the energy field of a yucca palm tree
generated signals to a computer to buy and sell shares on
the stock market. With the attempt to stimulate a market-adapted
habitat, the Yucca palm tree was watered and exposed to
sunlight in accordance with how well it did on the market.
For a later piece, NASDAQ Vocal Index, a computer
software was developed to turn the movements on the NASDAQ
Stock Exchange into musical scores. Ola Pehrson performed
the piece in different countries where he hired local choirs.
Each choir member was requested to represent one of the top
listed companies, basses were selected for the largest
companies and sopranos for the smaller. Together the choir
members sung the fast moving world economy in real time.
While engaging with global
capital and the virtual world, Ola Pehrson regularly
returned to the seemingly more tangible, small scale and
local perspective. In fact several of his works take as
their point of departure the suburban villa where he once
grew up with his father, a stock broker, and his mother, a
housewife. A work entitled Cookbook is based on menus
and notes that the artist’s mother wrote down for every
dinner she gave during 45 years and Birthday Party is
a reconstruction of her 65th birthday party, held in her
home on March 16, 2000. At first glace these works appear
quite different from his other works, however, compelling
connections are to be found through the artist's interest in
behavioural patterns, routines and in accumulated
information and data.
Ola Pehrson was born in Sweden
in 1964; he gained considerable international recognition
and was featured in the Istanbul-, Tirana- and Sao Paulo
biennial before he tragically died in a car accident in
2006. Pehrson's solo exhibitions include those at Galleri
Lars Bohman, Stockholm; Galeria Noua, Bucharest; Collective
Gallery, Edinburgh and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. His work
has been included in group exhibitions in Sweden at the
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, at the Malmö Konsthall and in
Japan at the Yamaguchi Museum of Art.
Ola Pehrson. Retrospective.
Ljubljana. Belgrade. Stockholm. is co-produced with Museum
of Contemporary Art Belgrade, where it will open on 1st of
February 2008, and with Färgfabriken in Stockholm, where the
opening and publishing of an extensive catalogue is
scheduled for October 2008. .
Curators:
Sa¹a Nabergoj, Joa Ljungberg
Project Manager:
Anneli Bäckman
The exhibition project is
organized in collaboration with
Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (Serbia)
and Färgfabriken in Stockholm
(Sweden).
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The
programme of ©kuc Gallery is supported by
Ministry of Culture of the Republic
of Slovenia and
City of Ljubljana –
Department of Culture.
For
further information contact Alenka
Gregoriè, artistic director of the ©kuc
Gallery on +386 1 251 65 40,
galerija.skuc@guest.arnes.si
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