"Eight Nordic Stories"
2002-07-11 until 2002-09-15
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea
Santiago, , ES Spain

Until relatively recently, whenever we talked about Nordic art we tended to associate it to topics like landscape, light, melancholy, and personal relationships...But today those clichés do not have any sense, especially when dealing with contemporary art. For this reason, this exhibition does not aim at showing the artists, topics or means of expression that could be typically called “Nordic”, although we have not shied away from their Nordic reality, its sublime nature, its solitude, the way it relates to rest of the world.

In Eight Nordic Stories we present the work of eight artists who were born in different countries but share what we could call a common geographic destination. When grouping them, we offer the beholder multiple readings, individual readings that respect the interpretations and the particular universe of each language.

Some of them work from a biographic point of view, which must be understood as the witness of a vital and creative experience, while others prefer to highlight the tensions amongst individuals and our present society, and others explore situations and materials taken from daily life events. The exhibition wants each work to talk individually, within their peculiarity: from extreme relationships (Eija-Liisa Ahtila); to the distortion of looks (Matts Leiderstam, Ann-Sofi Sidén), humorous depictions (Roi Vaara), the ritualisation of objects of common use (Maria Hedlund), the confrontation of the artistic space with the existence of the tangible and real world (Maaria Wirkkala), or the melange of fictitious and real atmospheres (Esko Männikkö, Joachim Koester). Our other aim is that the suggestions of images and stories lead the spectator to enjoy the pleasure of deciphering and interpreting each of the stories articulated around characters, situations and scenarios.

IMAGE:
Ann-Sofi Sidén
Station 10 and Back Again,
2001

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Spain

Other Important Exhibitions in Spain