Susanna Jablonski

Havremagasinet
Long Time Listener, First Time Caller, 2020
Glas, stones, feathers, wood, video, room resonators and other materials

With her new series of works, Susanna Jablonski has orchestrated a magical-realist situation in which we enter and hear, see and feel the world with fresh eyes. Reverberating in Susanna Jablonski’s installation is the history and legacy of Tyskmagasinen – former arms warehouses close to Luleå that were used by the German army throughout the Second World War, which stood as silent testimony to Sweden’s involvement in the War, and a physical contradiction to Sweden’s supposed neutrality. In 2016, on the anniversary of the so-called Midsummer Crisis, the buildings burned to the ground, and from the now desolate plot left behind after the fire, Jablonski has gathered shards of glass, charred wood and melted metal. What happens when a conflicted site of memorial goes up in smoke? Where does the narrative contained within these walls go? Jablonski’s installation invites us to see Havremagasinet – a konsthall in a former Swedish army grain storage building – and Tyskmagasinen as sibling structures that host both memory and histories, and that are implicated in a larger military and geopolitical complex. In her installation, Jablonski reactivates the history, the sounds and the traces of the war, while at the same time igniting new potential for these spaces.

Central to the presentation are the two sculptural bodies Long Time Listener and First Time Caller. These two sculptures that resemble dust sheets or stage curtains somehow, despite their monumentality, blend into the rear of the gallery space. In the hollowed out backs of the sculptures, small shelves carry found objects from the scene of the fire where Tyskmagasinen once stood – relics that amalgamate the disclosed with the covert. The glass objects hanging from the ceiling of the exhibition space take their shapes from Marc Chagall’s (a recurring point of reference for Jablonski) painting Le Grand Cirque (1956). Chagall’s allegorical painting expresses the invasion of the wondrous into the rhythm of everyday life. Details from the painting – musical instruments and four-fingered hands – hover above us like a mirage of a place that used to be. The room, its materials and history are performed by a number of site-specific instruments, designed in collaboration with the musician William Rickman. This spatial composition resounds with what was and what will be, as if Havremagasinet was haunted by both Tyskmagasinen and itself.

Inspired by the ribcage of a horse, the sculptural pair Shagal and Dov -one exposed, the other covered in feathers- are othered bodies reimagined through basket-weaving and textile. Together, they speak to a restructuring of the anatomy that holds bodies, and history, locked in place. Here, Marc Chagall returns via his Jewish birth name: Moishe Shagal. Similarly, Dov was one of Susanna’s grandfather’s Hebrew names, shedded once he arrived as a Holocaust survivor in Sweden. Shagal and Dov materialize an oscillation between personal memory, family history and greater historic narratives. Beside this pairing, three thin glass vessels carry and are shaped by coral fossils, playing a significant part in the installation through their embodiment of historic imprints of both physical bodies and their environment.

Galleri Syster
Flights, 2015~2020
Ceramic, water, marble, oak wood, a wasp nest, paper clay and other materials

Susanna Jablonski’s practice explores the limits of what it’s possible for different kinds of bodies to carry, or what they can become together. A marble slab balances against a pair of wafery feet made of paper clay, a wasp nest rests on a pillow of linen cloth, small objects in stone and ceramics levitate from the gallery walls; objects and materials that seem somehow monumental in their mundanity. The works on view at Galleri Syster address transformation and transience. They place us on a threshold where a tension has arisen between the elusive or unfathomable, and the most obviously perceptible.

Luleå konsthall
Susanna Jablonski & Cara Tolmie
Listening Curtain, 2019
Velvet, wool, nylon

This large fabric acts as a soft, malleable architecture, able to create delineated listening spaces within different venues. Sewn onto the dark velvet are two interpretations of a pillar and the rib bones of one of the oldest bi-pedal females – “Dinkinesh”, known in the west as “Lucy” named after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

Susanna Jablonski (b. 1985) is an artist based in Stockholm.

Work

Long Time Listener, First Time Caller, 2020
Glas, stones, feathers, wood, video, room resonators and other materials

Location

Havremagasinet, Boden
21.11–14.2

Work

Flights, 2015–2020
Ceramic, water, marble, oak wood, a wasp nest, paper clay and other materials

Location

Galleri Syster, Luleå
21.11–14.2

Work

Listening Curtain, 2019
Velvet, wool, nylon

Location

Luleå konsthall
21.11–14.2