Participating curators: Ester Maria d’Avossa, Nathalie Viruly, Jeanette Gunnarsson
Intuition at Hand introduces artistic works into the collection of the Silvermuseet Arjeplog through a collaboration with Stockholm University's curatorial fellows and Konstfrämjandet Norrbotten. Artists Jordana Loeb, Hedvig Bergman and Tomas Sjögren temporarily exhibit a variety of mediums or technologies within this historical context, and in doing so, complicate our understanding of time and tools.
The works, selected by Ester d'Avossa, Jeanette Gunnarsson and Nathalie Viruly from Stockholm University’s curatorial programme, interact with the anthropological collection and historic display through a similarity of material and storytelling. Bergman exhibits taxidermy and ceramic, Loeb, carved sonic woodworks, and Sjögren, a virtual reality that is both folklore and sci-fi. Seemingly familiar yet contemporary, this dialogue between objects offers a new perspective on the collection that is both celebratory and challenging.
Intuition at Hand focuses on the act of making. It asks what a tool is, who makes it and whether it can be inherently beautiful. Technology is in part an answer to these questions given the centrality of innovation in its definition. And while some would argue that a computer is exemplary, we suggest that the very fibre of the objects housed here and their function to meditate in a harsh world render them equal. Thus, these objects in relation, celebrate a variety of knowledge systems and practices; the feminine, natural and supernatural hand. And in doing so, partially dismember hierarchies of science and culture or art and craft, beauty and function, for their linear histories in this context and beyond.
Thus the axe and the artwork are perhaps the same. What matters is the intuition of the hand and a sense of perspective.
What can you make with a spruce tree, a piece of wood, a branch, or a twig? The answers are infinite if you know the fibres of its form. Fire, a home, a machine, combustion or a sound. The very particles morph with the manipulation of a skilled hand and sensibility of sustenance. Intuition at Hand introduces artistic works into the collection of the Silvermuseet Arjeplog through a collaboration with Stockholm University's curatorial fellows and Konstfrämjandet Norrbotten. Artists Jordana Loeb, Hedvig Bergman and Tomas Sjögren temporarily exhibit a variety of mediums or technologies within this historical context, and in doing so, complicate our understanding of time and tools.
Silvermuseet Arjeplog is a museum of collective memory. Its artefacts have been “lived in ''. They are objects of the home and habit – reckoning with nomadic traditions and home-making in the region. This gritty sensibility, technological by foresight and intent, also carries an inherent artistic quality or softness. Adaptability is transcendent of time and exists as a characteristic of creativity. Ursula Le Guin’s (2004) perhaps says it best in her essay “a rant about technology” when stating:
“We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called "technology " at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, and aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers – as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…” -
This sentiment is reflected by these three artists who conceptually question the binary of man, nature and technology.
Hedvig Bergman’s taxidermied sculpture Vanilla (2023) gestures to this world of contradictions. Coupled with some unruly eyes made of ceramic, the black taxidermied cock lies on a glass plate. This juxtaposition of saturation and transparency calls into question accepted knowledge systems and desires for homogeneity. Furthermore, the weighted sculpture is placed within the “men’s room”, and its presence challenges the “glass ceiling” of women’s labour, or the divisions of value reflected in the binary of art and craft based on function rather than form. Bergman’s skill, both physically and conceptually, is clear and her playfulness complexly narrates notions of destruction, endurance and the materials thereof in perhaps a stalemate of sorts.
Jordana Loeb amplifies unheard voices and experiences in her sound performance on the museum’s top floor. Loeb hand-carves wooden panes before connecting them to stethoscopic microphones to create a dialogical chorus with the “inanimate”. Wood is hardy stuff, but so is the electricity that makes a porous and melancholic sound with Loeb’s visceral translation of lumber. Her materials are emotive and brutal all at once, carrying memories of her chisel and tilled soil that once instructed their form. Forests are often described as neurological entities made of synapses or rooting. Loeb brings the natural world to the forefront and demands an ear for the sentient and solemn.
Within this headspace, Tomas Sjögren’s virtual reality work Mémoire vive punctuates the exhibition and questions who, when, and why is technology defined. Sjögren’s world is unsettling yet somehow familiar too. This digital construction is technology as we understand it, coded and innovative, thus rendering the represented creatures, and ornate Swedish architecture as both folklore and sci-fi. This blend of nostalgia and futuristic details allows the viewer to internally question modernity with youthful abandon and exploratory curiosity.
These threads of time and materiality, intersecting with natural and social constructs, discredit time and connect people to larger creative systems of making, tooling, aesthetics and listening. Thus, what mattered then matters now – a relationship between the world and man mediated by the objects and ideas we make. The slight, skill, and intuition of hand.
