Tracy Murinik : On show in Cape Town
A coffee pot with six spouts stands on a now coffee-stained table surrounded by six coffee cups into which it spurts the same, now-acrid coffee that it has been recycling for the past few weeks.
Mns Wrange’s Monument: Democratic Coffee Table with Fair Coffee Pot and Equal Coffee Cups, stands as a bizarre marker of a utopian vision caught off guard by reality, slightly dysfunctional in its idealism. Based on a ”proposal” for a monument to the idealistic concept of the Swedish Welfare State, it becomes both a comment upon and a warning of how democracy is often compromised.
It also recalls the fact that the Swedes are the second largest consumers of coffee in the world, and the amount of coffee that runs through this installation in an hour represents the average amount of coffee that a Swede drinks per year.
The piece forms part of Transpositions, an exhibition of contemporary Swedish art currently showing at the South African National Gallery (SANG). The exhibition is decidedly off-beat. Whether you’ve ever contemplated or encountered the realms of Nordic humour, sophistication and suss or not, this show is surprising, witty, elegant and intelligent. Jointly curated by Emma Bedford of the SANG and sa Nacking, guest curator at the Modern Museum in Stockholm, the project has entailed five Swedish artists travelling to Cape Town to install their works and to be involved in various workshops, including an exchange and residency programme with some South African artists on Robben Island.
Also interested in social relations, Elin Wikstrom sets up interactive ”situations”. In this instance she ”performs” and invites situations which insist on some social communication being created. A Portrait of Mr Weimar – the Man Who Every Thursday at Seven Makes a Meal for Himself and Mr Matzner in the Kitchen at Kellermanstrasse 87 is a story that she tells to people who enter her space at the Gallery.
As ”happens” in the story, Wikstrom has also advertised an invitation to cook for people in their homes for the duration of the exhibition.
In a notable coup, Matts Leiderstam accomplished the re-hanging of the SANG’s Room One: not an unnotable feat! A ”spot- the-difference” play, Leiderstam creates a mischievous dialogue between a painting chosen from the Abe Bailey collection of sporting paintings and its almost identical copy.
The original work, a painting by Abraham Cooper entitled The Day Family, showing a bourgeois Victorian family triumphantly displaying its two race horses has, in the latter instance, been retitled The Day Family (The Power and Pleasure of Breeding). Leiderstam instigates and implies a new moment of desire in his own version, introducing sexuality as a hidden sub-text.
Applying subtle subversion, he alters the nature of the gaze in the portrait by averting the eyes of all but the father away from the viewer. Pushed into awkward confrontation and awareness of his environment, the father stands self- consciously, challenging a return of his gaze.
The ”uses and abuses” of power are explored further by two other artists. Elisabet Apelmo explores threats of sexual violence and child abuse in her work White, a video installation, haunting in its suggestion of violation.
Focusing on very different sets of power relations, Annika Lundgren exposes and satirises the notion of ”the expert”. In an hysterically funny series of television lectures on a range of subjects spanning ethics, history, anatomy, zoology, therapy, nutrition and philosophy, Lectures 1997: A Closer Look at Everything, enlightens on the absurd nature of information generated as ”true fact” by the media. A lemon and a pepper argue about media ethics, while in Zoology, ants have been proven to express feelings of goodwill in their daily motions.
As I said, a little off-beat.
— Transpositions runs at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town until May 10