Exhibitions & projects
Group exhibition at Kalmar Art Museum May 27 – October 1.
Johanna Karlin, Anne Hamrin Simonsson, Jan Carleklev, and Amanda Selinder.
On May 27, Kalmar Art Museum will open the group exhibition "The Ear to the Ground and the View Outward." The exhibition is part of the first edition of the Småland Biennale, running throughout the summer of 2023. During the biennale, Kalmar Art Museum is also collaborating with Kulturvagnen, Kerstin Björk and Tony Blomdahl, and their renovated caravan that serves as a mobile art hall operating in the rural Småland region. The caravan's exhibition "Afterconstructions," which has followed an open call, will visit various locations in Kalmar County. The common thread between Kalmar Art Museum and Kulturvagnen is to rethink and reinterpret the concept of designed living environment.
Since 2018, designed living environment has been a unified policy area for which the Swedish Parliament has set goals. It involves a holistic view of our living environments where art, architecture, design, and cultural heritage must be a clear part of community planning throughout the country. But how is this realized, and what benefits do smaller communities gain, for example? Who or what determines how public spaces are designed and shaped? What role do art and professional artists, architects, and designers play in this interaction between citizens and politics? How might the Småland of the future take shape? The concept of designed living environment is generally defined as public spaces with squares, parks, playgrounds, and public buildings. However, if we broaden our thinking, one realizes that humans interact with everything around them. Can it even be likened to nature's way of organizing and structuring its living environments?
For the exhibition at Kalmar Art Museum, we have invited the artists: Johanna Karlin, Anne Hamrin Simonsson, Amanda Selinder, and Jan Carleklev. They all bring with them experiences of working in various ways with public commissions and/or site-specific investigations in different landscapes and environments. In the exhibition space on the museum’s top floor, the artists will install new site-specific works or further develop ideas and processes they wish to explore. Thematically, the focus is on provoking thoughts about what designed living environment is and can be, but the bureaucratic concept is rarely easily wedded to the unruly orbit of art. It is in the nature of art to be unpredictable and open to interpretation. Visitors will encounter, among other things, roots, imprints from sheep, logs (long, slender tree trunks), white shelves, soundscapes from tomato plants, and abstract scenes from the eye's cells.
