Ulla Wiggen

To be able to fully understand human life is an absurd thought. How cells have found new paths with new functions and have turned us into perceptive beings, able to feel pain and desire. The visible evidence itself, what was discovered at the invention of the microscope, hardly made it more intelligible. Blood red branches swaying like seaweed in plasma and lymph fluids. Passages that connect everything inside us into a network no less overwhelming than infinity.

Two brain halves rotate clockwise on the wall of Luleå Konsthall. These paintings resemble medical illustrations – the cross section of the brain exposes the different parts like a network of branches. While medical science has mapped much of the brain, the greater part remains unknown territory, and researchers estimate that we will not be able to grasp it fully within our lifetime. It is the same age-old questions that continue to baffle science: Is it possible to see the soul? Why do we dream? And why do humans feel the urge to express themselves through art?

In Ulla Wiggen’s precise acrylic paintings, the eye is detached from its biological context appearing instead as a kind of mysterious, hovering sun sign. The works were painted in 2017~2018, but Wiggen’s interest in the intricate circuits and connections through which abstract sensations emerge was sparked already in the 1960s. The eye is the bodily organ we most rely on when orienting ourselves through life. All different sequences of light flood through the adjustable orifice of the pupil to collide with an inner sensory system that interprets millions of signals every second. We ‘see’.

There are many obvious similarities between artificial technology and the human senses. The eye, our own organ of surveillance, is increasingly used to survey us too. Iris-scanning is no longer science fiction, but occurs increasingly in our day to day lives as well as in many professions. What information is gathered, how it is used, and who owns it, however, remains opaque.

Ulla Wiggen (f. 1942) is an artist based in Stockholm.

Thanks to gallery Belenius and Stockholms kulturförvaltning.

Work

Iris II, 2017
Iris VII, 2018
Iris IV, 2017
Golem III, 2017

Location

Luleå konsthall
17.11.2018–17.2.2018

Work

Passage, 2016

Location

Galleri Syster, Luleå
17.11.2018–17.2.2018