LB°18 — Artists
ARKIV
Måns Wrange (b. 1961, Åhus) is an artist based in Stockholm and Oslo.
Måns Wrange’s film Enemy of the people – A eldwork takes place in real time. That is to say, it is produced continuously throughout the period of the exhibition, from trailer at the opening to finished work on the biennial’s final weekend. The film is part of a project called The Scandal Syndrome that Wrange has been running together with the literary scholar Maria Karlsson for the past twelve years. The project explores art scandals or controversies as a symptom of the growing political and value-based polarisation in society that has become particularly prominent in the public discourse around art and culture over the past decade. Enemy of the people draws on classical anthropological fieldwork as well as the dramaturgy of reality TV and soap operas.
The Rashomon Project, an earlier work from The Scandal Syndrome, is also screening as part of the biennial. Here, Wrange investigates the story of The Banned Image, a work by the art collective Vector, which should have been shown at the end of the 2017 Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, but mysteriously disappeared just before its premier. By way of advanced AI-based text analysis software, the film traces the development of rumors and speculations that circulated on social media about what The Banned Image would have been about, and whether it was stolen, vandalised or censored.
The sculpture Monument shows a version of the classic Swedish coffee set Blå Blom [Blue Flower], but with six pipes on the coffee pot instead of one. Coffee flows through the pot into the cups and further down into a pool, where a pump directs it back into the pot in an endless cycle. The work is part of Wrange’s series The Aesthetics and Politics of Goodness (1991~99). It takes as its starting point the Swedish welfare state of the 1930s, which relied on the home both as a metaphor for “the good society” and for the implementation of some of its most fundamental social reforms, which would rationalise everyday life and educate people to become good citizens” – not only through politics but also aesthetics.
Måns Wrange (b. 1961, Åhus) is an artist based in Stockholm and Oslo.
Work
Enemy of the people – A eldwork, 2020~21
HD Video
Location
Luleå konsthall
21.11–14.2
Work
The Rashomon Project, 2017
HD Video
Work
Monument, 1993
Coffee, porcelain, wood, plastic, motorised pump
Location
Luleå konsthall
21.11–14.2
