The machines are in motion
18 februarY – 6 MARCH 2022
With the exhibition “The machines are in motion,” Havremagasinet temporarily moves out of its premises in the garrison area and takes over Boden’s city center. Storefronts and shop windows along Kungsgatan and Drottninggatan are activated with installations, videos, and paintings. Additional artworks can be experienced at Kungsbron, Kvarnängen, and the iconic acoustic shell, Örat. Art is thus mixed up and meets its audience in everyday life.
The exhibition prompts us to contemplate what work means today and how it relates to the city, the present time, and most importantly, to freedom. We become aware of how the material conditions of a place, along with the bodies that inhabit and work within it, create both local and global connections across time and space. Like the parts of a constantly moving machinery, everything seems interconnected.
Participating artists
Fikret Atay, born in 1976 in Batman, Turkey, and currently residing and working in Örebro. He sheds light on the tensions arising from the permanent conflict between the West and the East, civilians and the military, tradition and experimentation: A situation he has experienced in his hometown of Batman, Turkey, near the border with Iraq. His simple and unpretentious style lends an apparent straightforward authenticity to his images, yet the actions of the actors appear peculiar to viewers unfamiliar with the local culture. His art has been exhibited in international museums and art centers, biennials, and is part of several important museum collections.
Kalle Brolin has studied at Valand Academy and Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and is currently based in Malmö. He works with video installations, text and performance. His works have been exhibited at international biennials and art exhibitions. He is co-responsible for Sunshine Socialist Cinema; a solar-powered outdoor cinema, and has written for the cultural sections of Fria Tidningen as well as for several art magazines. His recent series of works, focusing on the landscapes and culture surrounding coal mines and sugar factories in southern Sweden have been exhibited at Malmö Konstmuseum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. These works are also part of an extensive tour with exhibitions and screenings in mining and sugar towns throughout Skåne. The works have also recently been included in academic research projects.
Suzanne Ciani is an American composer in the field of electronic and neo-classical music, trained at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been nominated for five Grammys, released over 20 solo albums, and composed music for numerous films since starting her career in the 1970s. Alongside music, she has also composed sound effects for companies and commercials, including Coca-Cola’s famous “pop-and-pour.” The instrument she is primarily associated with is “the Buchla” – an analog modular synthesizer that uses pressure-sensitive strips instead of a keyboard.
Theresa Traore Dahlberg is an artist and filmmaker with degrees from both Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Royal Institute of Art. She grew up in Skogsby, Öland and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and currently resides and works in Stockholm. In her films, everyday depictions of work and feminism have been central, such as in “Taxi Sisters” which explores the lives of seven women working as taxi drivers in Senegal, “Ouaga Girls” depicting a car mechanics class at a girls’ school in Ouagadougou, and “Ambassador’s Wife” a portrayal of the daily life of a French ambassador’s wife. Traore Dahlberg frequently works with installations that address work, post-industrial society and processes of change. These installations incorporate materials with inherent significance, such as glass, copper and cotton.
Daniel Traore is an artist trained at Ölands Folk High School in Skogsby and Diagonal Academy in Stockholm. He lives and works in southern Öland.
Frihetsförmedlingen, created in 2014 by artists Lars Noväng and John Huntington is a project that takes place in society through physical offices and through the website frihetsformedlingen.se. During the exhibition period one can visit the agency’s self-service station in Enter Galleria, as well as an unopened office at Kungsgatan 33. Lars Noväng is a self-taught artist with extensive activity since the early 2000s. He has consistently and long-term developed his conceptual artistic ideas and methodology, exploring the agency of art in processes of change. Through art as non-representation he seeks to expose, challenge and address hidden power structures, established truths and myths in the late modern society. John Huntington is an artist trained at Konstfack and Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. He works within a conceptual tradition expressed through performance, sculpture, text and installations. Through various forms of interventions and assertions he questions established agreements regarding everyday life, work environments, public institutions and political spaces. In his works John explores the border between the everyday and art, the individual and the institution, the citizen and society. He often engages in collaborative projects where the common thread is the exploration of the ritual aspects of our daily existence.
Petra Hultman graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in 2017 and has since gained significant recognition for her narratives on craftsmanship, diligence and work. Her works revolve around the relationship between time, labor and value, with a particular focus on rhetoric and ideals from the era of the Swedish welfare state directed towards the Swedish housewife and the extensive amount of reproductive work performed by women within the confines of the home. Petra directs her gaze towards memory and identity, examining how they are constructed and manifested within individuals and society. She has a particular interest in how ideals and ideologies are expressed, received, shape us and are perpetuated.
Lennart Nilsson, (1922, Strängnäs – 2017, Stockholm) was a Swedish photographer best known for his groundbreaking medical photography using pinhole techniques. Notable works include the film “The Story of Life” and the book “A Child is Born” in which he successfully photographed a living fetus inside the womb. He began his career in the mid-1940s as a photojournalist for magazines such as Se and Life.
Eyvind Johnson (1900, Boden – 1976, Stockholm) attended primary school and later worked in various occupations. As a writer, he made his debut in 1924 and achieved breakthrough success in the 1930s with the autobiographical novel series “The Novel about Olof,” which is considered the pinnacle of Swedish working-class literature. Among his most notable works are the Krilon Trilogy, Return to Ithaca, and The Days of His Grace. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Gothenburg in 1953 and became a member of the Swedish Academy in 1957. He received the De Nios Prize in 1936, the Literature Promotion Award in 1956, the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1962, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974, jointly with Harry Martinson.
