"Here no fire will be put out!"/ "Här ska ingenting släckas!", mixed media installation, video loop, suspended plexiglass heart shaped video projection, copper heart chain, 2013.
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My own notes on the piece that was shown in my studio for a one night only event:
In Här ska ingesting släckas!, roughly translated as Here no fire will be put out!, I created a projection in the shape of a heart containing a series of scenes with falling sparks, flashing lights and flowers that were thrown towards the camera. The heart-screen was hanging in the middle of a narrow room, the floor was covered with a thin layer of oil and the doorway was blocked off by a chain of small copper hearts.
As a viewer you could not walk past the chain, you had to stand outside of the space to view the projection. This unwelcoming distance made the piece immediately less cute than what the symbol first appeared as. The ambiguity of not knowing what the intentions of the piece might be, if it was sarcastic or genuine, must have been an issue for the viewer. Looking at the heart, I too have an ambiguous feeling about it, and I intentionally chose to work with it precisely because of that reason.
The symbol of the heart is for me one of the most impossible symbols to work with. I can simply not see any way of transforming it, so it seems to me to be the ultimate challenge. By facing such a cliché my own attitude towards it comes into question and it fascinates me how hard it is to make up ones mind about it. It goes back and forth between being almost repulsive, annoying, provoking to being comical, joyful and seductive.
I think of clichés as deeply immersive parts of humanity that we either simply don’t see or that we are used to try to detect and resist. By having it be right in your face as a piece of art with images projected on it that is following a similar set of clichés might then be startling. Whether it pleases or upsets people, it seems that this duality, of not knowing what side to take, of feeling pleasure and disgust at the same time, never cease to fascinate me.