Total recall

Total Recall RAPHAEL EGLI SUSANNE HÖGDAHL HOLM KATE LARSON KENNETH PILS PONTUS RAUD BERTRAM SCHILLING NICHOLAS SMITH

Total Recall

A SCREEN-STARING, BUTTON-CLICKING NEW VERSION OF HOMO SAPIENS. Amber Case

Total Recall

Total Recall RAPHAEL EGLI SUSANNE HÖGDAHL HOLM KATE LARSON KENNETH PILS PONTUS RAUD BERTRAM SCHILLING NICHOLAS SMITH

Total Recall

Nicholas Smith

Pontus Raud

Kate Larson

Susanne Hรถgdahl Holm

Total Recall Bertram Schilling

Kenneth Pils

Raphael Egli

TOTAL RECALL Contemporary landscapes - presentation/representation of realities.

Exhibition at Studio 44 Stockholm, April 2012

RAPHAEL EGLI • SUSANNE HÖGDAHL HOLM • KATE LARSON • KENNETH PILS • PONTUS RAUD • BERTRAM SCHILLING • NICHOLAS SMITH Total Recall is an interdisciplinary project where both art and philosophy investigate a condition that stems from an everyday experience of being virtually surrounded by images and texts.

These images and texts are usually in a digital form, and this does have some consequences for the project, but it is not the digital-technological character itself that is in the forefront. Instead, it is an experience of images and texts in a new kind of time and space which can most easily be described by means of new media: mobile phones that are employed to take and distribute photos and video clips but also text messages; the internet with an emphasis on social media (Facebook), blogs, YouTube and many more.

The exhibition will at least on the surface focus on “landscape painting” but in this case landscape is

BEING IN THE WORLD Being in the world [BITW] is a collaboration between visual artists, writers and theorists from different European countries. Themes are circulating around the topic of landscape in a wider meaning of the word.

That is – to be in, look out on and relate to the world.

BITW-project is meant to give a variety of perspectives on the current situation by doing practical art research evoked and inspired by discussions on the topic among the participants. Results are made accessible through public presentations.

There will be a number of group-shows in various European cities organized by BITW. Every presentation has its own subtopic that will focus on a specific field within the realm of the overall landscape topic.

understood as a concept in transformation. The way of both our outer geographical and inner psychological landscapes have been changed by the experience of virtual space and presence. Thereby our relation to the creation of new images, to present and represent realities, has also altered – even though this is a movement in both directions at the same time.

By producing and reflecting aspects of this experience in the ‘slow’ media of painting and writing, the project wishes to explore what can vaguely be called a condition in our time. Is this condition a result of these experiences, or do these technologies and experiences become possible because of this condition?

www. beingintheworld. net

The exhibition is supported by Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse, Erwin und Gisela von Steiner-Stiftung, City of Munich - Department of Arts and Culture

RAPHAEL EGLI Luzern

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“Forest (Zimmeregg, Luzern, Switzerland)” Acrylic binder and pigments on wall, 375Total x 580 Recall cm

SUSANNE HÖGDAHL HOLM Stockholm

“Who killed Bambi?”

On the wall, Oil on canvas, 95 cm Total On theRecall floor, Oil on canvas mounted on styrofoam blocks, 60 x 120 x 11 cm

Susanne Högdahl Holms „CDF“ –Serie sind Graphitzeichnungen, die im Rahmen eines Stipendiums auf Rügen entstanden sind, wo sie sich auf den Spuren von Caspar David Friedrich mit dessen Kompositlandschaften auseinandersetzte. Die Linien in ihren Arbeiten führen zuweilen wie ein Sog in eine weite Landschaft, ein Thema, das auch Friedrich mit anderen zeichnerischen Mitteln bearbeitete. Sie unterzieht die Zeichnungen einem Abstraktionsprozess, die rhythmisierte Landschaft wird fragmentiert und rerhythmisiert. Dabei werden Perspektiven gebrochen, geometrische Strukturen, die auch Zeichen der touristischen Erschließung und menschlicher Bearbeitung der Landschaft sind, erkannt und in den Vordergrund gerückt. Horizontale Ruheflächen und dynamische Diagonalen wechseln sich ab. Ein vielfältiges Rügen ist zu sehen und vielfach scheint der graue, regenschwere Himmel eines verdorbenen Sommers über der Landschaft zu lasten.

Susanne Papenfuss, Kuratorin Caspar David Friedrich Zentrum Total Recall

KATE LARSON Stockholm & Öland

INSUFFICIENT TEXT Part of the poem “Otillräcklig text”, the original text is written in Swedish.

Insufficient A word to investigate – because the feeling is so strong, fully avalanche: I am the hand of omissions And yet: This is what you have, even I have learned, it must be investigated, a critical gaze is the balance between being no-one and just me, as well as being human or maybe nothing

So, I find myself in a situation, it is hot, perhaps there is a dilemma – and a decision is required

“Insufficient text” Slideshow (textual graphics) 6:32 Total min:sec Recall

False decisions lead to yearning

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KENNETH PILS Stockholm

“Clubhouses-Greenies-Lemonade” Total Recall Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 133 cm

Total Recall

PONTUS RAUD Stockholm

”That Room we Talked About” (To the left) flash animation, collaboration with Charlie Raud ”The Pink Minefield” (To the right) pastel on paper, 65 x 50 cm

Total Recall

BERTRAM SCHILLING Munich

“Again and Again” Collage, 120 x 50 cm

NICHOLAS SMITH Stockholm

“Total Recall” Textual graphics, video projection, 6:32 min:sec Total Recall Nicholas Smith & Anna Stina Erlandsson

Total Recall

Bertram Schilling Total Recall “Layers”, Collage, 40 x 50 cm

TOTAL RECALL - BEING SURROUNDED BY IMAGES AND TEXTS “Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unim agined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict” (Martin Jay).[1]

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part of our new predicament, or what may perhaps be called a condition, seems to find expression in a new alloy of emotions and technology. There is an increasing feeling of being constantly submerged in never ending receptions and relays of images and text messages. There is also and at the same time a feeling of extreme rapidity in these processes, which border on re-presentation being simultaneous with the event (digital transmission of live-broadcast). New technology, it seems, alters our traditional conceptions of two central notions, namely our conception of the event and its reproduction. This process is in part well documented in media- and technology studies, urban anthropology and sociology etc. But the philosophical consequences of this condition has proved difficult to fathom, not only because of its happening here and now, and the rapidity whereby new technology is introduced. There are, I will argue, aspects of this that need translation into other contexts (such as art, thinking and poetry) in order to be understood.

Technology by itself, for instance, is clearly not the place from which to reflect on these processes. A hypothesis here is that this predicament or condition must correspond to a new ‘transcendental aesthetics’ since the processes alluded to effect our most fundamental categories of understanding, which since Kant have been determined as time and space, outlined in his Critique of Pure Reason. To put the question in as

naïve a form as is possible, one can ask: What time is it on the internet? What is the internet and where is it? Even though there are perfectly good technical answers to these simple questions, these will have little to do with our understanding of what is really happening.

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e are both subjected to this onslaught of images and texts, and actively support it by contributing to its dissemination (both professionally and in our personal lives). But who are “we” here, what is the community that is at stake? Are we speaking only as passive consumers of capitalist merchandise we have no real option to turn away from? Or is it a community of ‘citizens’, with the power and obligation to act politically in (what can here, for the sake of brevity, be called) democratic systems? More to the point: does this new experience only arise for those who participate in the techno-scientific communal ‘world’? As a first answer I think one must say yes, there is a restriction and a locality operative here, but one that does not function according to the traditional binaries of rich/poor, developed/underdeveloped, North/South, colonial/colonized etc. For the effects of this new time and space is also in a sense “global” and reach into the remote, poor and underdeveloped parts of the world. What is this ‘locality’? It is closely tied to virtuality in the sense of atopic technology and capitalist marketing strategies on the one hand, but equally so to liberatory and perhaps even revolutionary politics that are always bound to a place, a specific culture.

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ur culture today – restricting the scope here to Western culture (as if that was something that could be done) – is predominantly visual. In a certain sense, this is no news. As many have pointed out, ever since the Platonic determination of thinking in its highest form as theoria, i.e. a ‘seeing’ of ideas or forms, the emphasis on visual activities and metaphors have come to dominate Western culture.

In Plato’s work Timaeus, the genesis of sight is compared to that of reason and intellect, whereas the genesis of the other senses such as touching and Total Recall

smelling is relegated to the lower, material parts of the body. With the ‘mind’s eye’, we can perceive the highest, transcendent being of the forms or ideas, which later Christian philosophers adopted to the

world in which they were made, but that they also contribute in transforming our perception:

possibility to ‘see’ God, a notion that was reinforced during the renaissance with thinkers such as Ficino (who translated Plato into Latin). Vision was then dubbed ‘the noblest of the senses’ by philosophers such as Descartes and Thomas Reid in the 17th and 18th century.[2]

collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history. The era of the migration of peoples, an era which saw the rise of the late-Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a different perception [sondern auch eine andere Wahrnehmung].[4]

Just as the entire mode of existence of human

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hat is at stake is the question of what role the contemporary culture of notably digital images and texts that centres around what used to be called the Internet 2.0, plays in this scheme. It may seem far-fetched to hypothesize that there could be any more significant links between the metaphysics of optics in the history of philosophy and posting lowresolution video clips on YouTube, but this is nevertheless an idea that is investigated in the project.

What could make such a hypothesis more plausible?

First of all, stretching credibility somewhat, there is the historical connection between precisely Platonism which can be seen as an interconnection between non-sensuous forms and the WorldWideWeb. Internet can be seen as a kind of ‘materialization’, in similarly

If Benjamin’s thesis is correct, then we should consider the possibility that today, as we speak, our sense perception is altered by means of the new, digital media. Perhaps this is part of what lies behind the today common experience, predominantly amongst youth, whereby the witnessing of an event in real life only gains the character of ‘reality’ after having been posted (or mobile-filmed and uploaded) on social media (Facebook, YouTube) and there received its due of “I like”-clicks or comments by friends. What the eye sees is not registered as ‘real’ in the intersubjective

non-sensuous cyberspace, of ideas that must be historically connected to Platonism via the naturalscientific revolution initiated by Galilei, Descartes and Newton in the 17th century. A central aspect of this new determination of the world is that the whole world becomes calculable, it is as if a web of ideas (mathematical, physical) were cast over the world achieving a non-religious sense of unity that had never occurred previously. The threads of the mathematico-physical project here for the first time achieve a universality that is non-negotiable.[3] This is the beginning of the internet in a sense, the seed from which it sprang.

sense (where we can agree that this happened, and had the character of event) until it has been medialized, presented on the internet and been acknowledged by peers. This is what makes reality today. In a certain sense, this has always been the case: practically speaking, we always communicate in a dialectic of saying and response so that what is said awaits the confirmation or negation by the other. The ‘press click if you like’-culture prevalent on Facebook would only supervene on already active structures of social communication, and in that sense merely make more visible what has already been going on for a long time.

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n an important text, written in exile from Nazi persecution in Paris in the mid 1930’s, Walter Benjamin argues that artworks not only reflect the surrounding

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n her essay “Plato’s cave”, Susan Sontag speaks of the ‘shock’ that photographs can bring with them when they show something new. The example she discusses is her own experience as a twelve-year

old when she for the first time saw photos of BergenBelsen and Dachau by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in 1945. At that time, it was possible to be a “horror virgin” she explains in a later interview, but the

manual sketchbook are reconstructed on the wall in an attempt to reappropriate the historically laden tradition of landscape painting (Egli). There are also images that have not been selected by the artist at all, but that

proliferation of images in the following decades has, according to Sontag, effectively rendered this impossible. In the essay, she says that her life was divided into a before and after having seen the photographs, and she describes the event in inverted theological terms saying that it was a “negative epiphany”, the “prototypically modern revelation”.[5] In the interview from 1979, Sontag explains further:

stem from a non-algorithmic random generator (based on atmospheric noise), which has ‘selected’ images in a completely arbitrary fashion from the internet’s infinity of images (Pils). In both cases, the images procured then serve as mere material to be worked on artistically, and it is the transformations that occur in this process that ‘makes’ the artwork.

Nicholas Smith

I think that that experience was perhaps only possible at that time, or a few years after.

Today that sort of material impinges on people very early – through television, say – so that it would not be possible for anyone growing up later than the 1940’s to be a horror virgin and to see atrocious, appalling images for the first time at the age of twelve. That was before television, and when newspapers would print only very discreet photographs. As far as what died – right then I understood that there is evil in nature.[6]

______________________________________ [1] See M. Smith (ed.), Visual Culture Studies. Interviews with Key Thinkers, (London: Sage, 2008) p. 182f.

[2] For general treatments of this issue, see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press, 1994).

[3] See the analyses of Alexandre Koyré, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger for instance.

For us today, as Sontag I think rightly suggests, this relation between image and feeling no longer seems possible. In fact, the relation between image and experience seems to be a precise inversion of what she describes: prior to reflection and knowledge about historical facts, we are immersed in images of them.

This signals a shift in how we conceive of not only our relation to singular images, but more decisively about what experience is and also about the ontology of the image. As Deleuze puts it, it is not that we are surrounded by images so much, for we are not: what surrounds is clichés, and the problem is instead the difficult encounter with a wholly different type of images: that is to say, tearing real images from clichés. [7] This is what lies behind the work done and presented in this exhibition. Just to point out two extremes in the variety of working methods: There are images ‘directly’ from nature, impressions that via the

[4] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Jennings, Doherty & Levin (ed.s), (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008), p. 23. The German text is in: Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 2, p. 439.

[5] Susan Sontag, ”Plato’s cave” in On Photography [1973], electronic edition: 2005 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York, p. 14f.

[6] ”Sontag Talking”, interview with Charles Simmons, December 18, 1977 in The New York Times www. nytimes.com/1977/12/18/books/booksspecial/ sontag-talking.html [7] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, tr. H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 20ff.

Total Recall

Preparations

The group having a meeting in Stockholm some months after the exhibition, discussing experiences from the project.

November 11 2012

Opening April 13 2012

Artist talk Moderator Po Hagstrรถm (Left), April 14 2012

Total Recall

EMAIL-CONVERSATIONS WINTER 2011/2012 Our idea for the Total Recall- project came up in February 2011. The plan was to set up a landscape exhibition focusing on the practice of painting. During preparations of Total Recall our focus shifted to the contemporary experience of speed and the impact of technology on our lives, mainly the information technology.

Here are some snippets from our email discussions which IRL continued during building up the exhibition and the artists’ talk. Afterwards efforts within the network have led to the “Being In The World” project.

Dear participants of “Total Recall” I hope you had a wonderful Christmas holiday!

I’m prolonging my stay in the darkest northern Sweden.

In a small village called Yrttivaara http://g. co/maps/3zvru. Right now it’s 40 cm of snow, -22 Celsius. The sun can be seen above the horizon between 10-14. Highly recommended! Being here is a wonderful way to forget about civilization for a while and get your senses back.

But anyway, to get back to our theme, - you just have to see this lecture at TED http://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now.html Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember and even live out secondary lives. /Kenneth

Hi everybody, The name “Total Recall” is certainly blinking to the film

by Paul Verhoeven with the same name (1990) which (to make it really short) is about disorientation and awakening. The reality of the situation is constantly in question. Who is he? Which personality is correct? Which version of reality is true? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100802/plotsummary To link this to our project, with mainly painters and theorists, is to connect this to our current state as painters and theorists. In 1990 the notion of the world was quite different, the concept of the global world was totally different then.

There has been an ongoing discussion about how the new conditions affect us. (Here’s an example, Speed and Information: Cyber-

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space Alarm!, Paul Virilio) http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=72 What’s interesting about our project is how we as painters (hands on artists belonging to an ancient art genre) and theorists are going to reflect on that in a visual way. New media has always been connected with “The new conditions” but how is it with painting and visual theory?

Landscape (as a concept) has the notion of looking out on the world. And in a larger perspective understand what we really have to do on this planet. How is it today? How are we looking out? How would a landscape painting today look compared with earlier ones?

As an example on how things have changed you could take photographic images.

There is an abundance of images, everybody has tons of images on their hard disc drives. We have hard times to evaluate them and trash the ones we don’t need. In many cases (from own experience) I take a photo of an occasion so I can later experience it - if I have the time… I could also send the image to another person and trash it after- not really reflecting on the image myself.

I remember the days when I had 12 images on my 6x6 camera and every image counted. I really had an unconditionally focus on every each of them. They represented specific unique experiences of my life. They were documents.

Personally I feel that the abundance and focus on communication/interrelation do something terrible with us -we can no longer feel a unique moment. The images could be replaced with people.

Best, Kenneth

Hello everybody, I am also still on holiday, but thought I should write a few lines about how I am working. I plan to show some new paintings especially made for the “Total Recall” exhibition. In earlier works I have explored how a digitally prepared photo can be transformed into an analog painting : what is happening with the viewer’s perception and so on.

When I read the texts you’ve been writing I thought about Merleau-Ponty and his theories about perception especially concerning photographic images.

Last week, after seeing all the pictures from the massacre at Utöya in Norway, I really have thought a lot about the speed with which pictures invade our minds and how unreal they make me feel. The same pictures are showed everywhere and are almost worn out in a couple of hours. The horrible actions depicted in the pictures don’t feel real, more like a scene from a movie.

I sometimes think that the slow technique of painting makes me at least feel real, and that’s maybe why I’m still painting.

Greetings, Susanne

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Good morning!

I ve recently been reading in Alexander Kluge’s book “The Art of Making Difference”.

In 17th century France they made maps for their feelings. The geography of love and hate, etc.

Happy islands surrounded by the sea of sadness or the sea of irritation. Really nice maps, for example: Kingdom Of Love!

Made me think of Amber Case again… we are all cyborgs, external brains, external feelings… greetings, Bertram

Fascinating!

Carte du royaume du coquetterie!

- is that then translated as “Karte des Königreichs der Liebe”? If so, it opens perspectives of time and language and in the end of cultural difference; a normal Swedish understanding of the word coquetterie means something like an exaggerated show-off, a bit swanky, effeminate manifestation of emotions. Clearly something has happened from the French 17th century meaning of the word; also compared to Kluge’s (?) translation. It could be worth looking into. Suddenly a whole linguistic area, known from poetry but also employed by pop songs etc. gain new meaning: a sea of distress (yes! Literally a sea!!), a mountain of sadness etc. - it all makes more sense. New questions arise though: is the sea, mountain etc. located within us or outside of us? Do we need a new conception of subjectivity, based on another kind of understanding of borders (inner/ outer) in order to accommodate this “Geografie der Liebesfähigkeiten”?

Wonderful pictures! /Nicholas

Chronik der Gefühle… very interesting!!

I haven’t thought about it this way before… It is like having your brain outside yourself in form of parts in a landscape/map - a mind map. It could also be visualized like a person with a landscape head… or a beheaded person walking around in a landscape. The cyborg idea that Amber Case describes is about having the mind resources (memories, databases) and connection possibilities in external gadgets. If you lose them you’re crippled - and can’t function in our (developed) society in a proper way.

Thanks Bert! /Kenneth Total Recall

Hello all, thanks for e-mails that open questions and yet attempt to focus the theme (also thanks for comments on my text).

I’m just in for a brief city stop.

Concerning texts in the exhibition - still an open question; I have an idea (vaguely similar to something Roland Barthes did in the early ‘80s) to present snippets of text as projections/prints on the wall, ceiling, floor: readable fragments that touch upon the subject, words going in and out of the images (your images), emphasizing parts and redirecting attention.

Not in an attempt to interpret images, nor to underline or clarify but to present parts of statements the completeness of which can only be guessed.

This is a rough sketch of a possible presentation, I don’t know what you all think. One idea behind this would be to approach a less determined linguistic form, the fragment here understood more as an echo of a fullness of meaning no longer there (unlike a more romantic position where the fragment is the highest achievement of meaning possible). /Nicholas

A slow-digesting strategy Labyrinth serves as an analogy for the world of images in an age of Flickr, YouTube and cell phone cameras, where there are endless variations of one image, one beside the other, duplicate, copy, transformations and reinterpretations.

We can’t go on like we did. Our relationship to images has changed.

Our time creates and demands (from us) new ways of conceptualizing and handling images. There are both dangers and hopes here.

One therapeutic strategy would be to insert the painting act into the labyrinthine world of images, the substance is processed/ digested in a subjective / physical way which creates an interesting dialectic between the exterior, interior and virtual reality.

How can we cope with, handle and navigate in this pervasive force of visual information that surrounds us from all directions. There is an image flow with a presence, quantity and speed like no other. What historical, psychological, philosophical references / metaphors can bring sense in this context?

How will it affect us? Can painting, or any other slow, hands-on media, operate as a tool to maintain a kind of grounding integrity? Is it possible or even necessary to be critical to the speed and overload of our times?

It would be interesting to see what comes out of project Total Recall.

Best, Kenneth Total Recall

RAPHAEL EGLI

SUSANNE HÖGDAHL HOLM

* 1975, Luzern, Switzerland Painting, Sculpture, Installation www.raphael-egli.ch

* 1966, Stockholm Painting, Installation www.studio44.se/nyhemsida/medlemmar/hogdahl/ index.html

“Forest (Zimmeregg, Luzern, Switzerland)”, acrylic binder and pigments on wall, 375 cm x 580 cm

To make seeing visible What does seeing mean? What is a picture?

Raphael Egli paints pictures from what he sees. He goes out and looks at landscapes, the surface of a lake, forests, hills and mountains, buildings and groups of buildings, the sky and clouds. He paints on-site in small format – a picture of moments, a cursory rendition of landscape, its individual traits

“Who killed Bambi?”, oil on canvas, 95 cm

My work is based on the myth of Actaeon, the young hunter who wandered into a forbidden part of the forest where he saw Artemis, the goddess of hunting, and her nymphs bathing naked in a pond. As a punish-

typified. He devotes himself with great intensity to the value of the colours in order to capture a singular mood, a particular lighting. The fleeting light that lies on the landscape and enhances its reaches and depths acquires enduring solidity in Egli’s pigments.

The work of Raphael Egli reveals what it takes to translate seeing into imagination. It is a painter’s translation, whose focal point is colour. The way in which light works on matter, lends its shape and visibility to the thoughts within it – these are the questions Egli pursues. His paintings seek to fathom what seeing means and what a picture is.

ment, he was transformed into a deer and was chased and torn apart by his own dogs. What does this old myth have to do with our modern society and its flow of images and information? What I have found relevant is precisely the possibility to study a course of events from a distance, without taking part, and then suddenly finding yourself unveiled and chased by your own most loyal adherents. The safety behind the screen is a chimera, and by taking part of the flow of images you also become a collaborator.

Today’s flow of images has both created a distance between us and placed us in direct communication in real time with most of the world. My work also refers to the gaze that characterized a large part of the 20th century: the urge to classify and divide the world into different systems of hierarchy based on gender and race, a way of thinking that has unfortunately found new disciples through all channels that

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our new systems of communications offer.

KATE LARSON

KENNETH PILS

* 1961, Stockholm & Öland, Sweden Poet, Philosopher, Writer, Editor at “Bokförlaget Lejd”. www.lejd.se/’

* 1964, Huskvarna Painting, Sculpture, Installation www.pils.se

Still from slideshow, part of the poem “Insufficient text”.

“Condensing-Treat-Wombat”, random painting, acrylic on canvas, 66x64 cm

This is what you have, even I have learned, it must be investigated, a critical gaze is the balance between being no-one and just me, as well as being human or maybe nothing Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s saying “A poetic image is not a comparison”, I have made a slideshow of a new poem. The poem itself is the result of a blending of different kinds of space: the spaces of the dream, of memory and a philosophical reading of space and emptiness. By “playing” the poem in the exhibition room, the text becomes transformed into image, and the spatial thematic acquires a double-edged concreteness.

This is my research The paintings in the exhibition “Total Recall” contains images taken from the internet. Through an elaborate random process, the images and compositions are chosen to generate a digital photo collage. By the act of painting, the images are then transformed into “implausible” works of art open to our interpretation.

The Internet offers an abundance of images and texts. Time shortage compels a reading technique that follows the familiar patterns of thought, where content is quickly summarized, to determine whether it is worth our attention or not.

What happens if we let chance rule the selection process instead and provide “what emerges” our undivided attention? Does this starting point in the creative process increase the chances of detecting repressed or overlooked aspects? Can one develop new ways to perceive and handle things? At least that’s what I hope for.

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PONTUS RAUD * 1962, Stockholm Painting, Video www.raud.se

of the transparent surface. Together with Marla’s performance and my painting, the image becomes a contemporary phenomenon, where the presentation is increasingly becoming the main ingredient.

In the video “That Room we Talked About” I continue the game with Photoshop symbols of nonexistent plans where the minefield (which is located in the border between Syria and Turkey) is one of our reality non-existent fields. I can well imagine that we eventually dissolve reality through our global context.

Maybe we finally choose a custom documentation as the basis via a digital forum. A story that is tailored to us from different social parameters- a vegan’s mathematics.

“Marla”, pastel, 70 x 100 cm

In the painting “ Marla “ from 2012, we see Marla Bendini, a transsexual artist from Singapore, carrying out a performance in the “Rainbow Art Projects” booth at Supermarket Stockholm Independent Art Fair 2012.

As project leader of the art fair, I don´t have enough time to experience the exhibitions. In this case I took a quick photo when I rushed past Marla’s performance while having thoughts elsewhere. I chose this moment to be one of my starting points for the exhibition “Total Recall” - a documentary relationship.

Painting is time consuming and there were moments of reflection on Marla’s nakedness and her status as a transsexual in her homeland. Painting for me is a lot about the room and the light. I use a lot of digital photos and I use Adobe Photshop. I like to play with Photoshop and its imaginary chequerboard image Total Recall

BERTRAM SCHILLING

NICHOLAS SMITH

* 1971, Munich, Germany Painting, Collage, Installation www.bertram-schilling.com

* 1964, Stockholm Philosopher

“Total Recall” (textual graphics), 6:32 min:sec, Nicholas Smith & Anna Stina Erlandsson

Nicholas Smith is a senior lecturer with the Department of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Stockholm (Sweden). He received his Ph.D. in theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University. He has done research at the Husserl-archives, Leuven and taught at PUC in Rio de Janeiro. At the same time he has held numerous “Imperia”, painting on collage 23 x 32 cm

Most of my working-patterns are based on intuitive and experimental processes. Everything that happens on the paper or the canvas is done without a preconceived plan. Forms and structures continuously alter: I undo, layer and replace one configuration for another.

The focus shifts as coincidences occur and leave traces of past considerations behind. The content is pared down and the pieces become the by-product of a thought process, constructing their own independent variation of imaginary form.

international lectures and conferences.

His present research project is “Perceptions of the Other”: aesthetics, ethics and prejudice; it investigates proto-ethics of perception from the point of view of transcendental aesthetics (Levinas, Husserl), psychoanalysis (Kristeva, Lacan), feminist philosophy (Young, Butler, Alcoff) and postcolonial thinking (Césaire, Fanon, Gordon, Ahmed).

His most recent book is “Towards a Phenomenology of Repression” – a Husserlian Reply to the Freudian Challenge (Stockholm 2010).

Nicholas Smith is co-editor of “Södertörn Philosophical Studies” (2003, 2014). He has translated Ricoeur, Nietzsche, Derrida and Husserl and has written extensively on phenomenology, contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis and art in Swedish, English, German, Brazilian and French publications.

Total Recall

IMPRINT Idea concept: Kenneth Pils Organisation: All participants Design: Kenneth Pils and Bertram Schilling Layout: Kenneth Pils, www.pilsdesign.se Editors: Kenneth Pils, Bertram Schilling and Julia Hürter Photo credits: © the artists Cover images: front: Raphael Egli, back: Susanne Högdahl Holm Exhibition views: photos by Kenneth Pils Publisher: Being in the World, www.beingintheworld.net Thank you for your support: Studio 44 All Sponsors Po Hagström for being the moderator at the artist talk Studio 44 Tjärhovsgatan 44 116 28 Stockholm www.studio44.se Date: 9 December 2013 Printing Company: Print24 Edition: 1000

www.studio44.se

TOTAL RECALL Raphael Egli | Susanne Högdahl Holm | Kate Larson Kenneth Pils | Pontus Raud | Bertram Schilling Nicholas Smith

Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse

13.04.12 - 29.04.12 12-18, Ons-Fre 12-16, Lör-Sön

Vernissage Fre 13.04.12, 18-22

Studio44, Tjärhovsgatan Total Recall

The exhibition is supported by:

44, Stockholm

Erwin und Gisela von Steiner-Stiftung City of Munich - Department of Arts and Culture

Total Recall

CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPES PRESENTATION/REPRESENTATION OF REALITIES EXHIBITION AT STUDIO 44 STOCKHOLM, APRIL 2012 EXHIBITORS FROM LUZERN MUNICH STOCKHOLM ÖLAND