ARTIST
WRITER
CURATOR
ART HISTORIAN
susannefesse@gmail.com
DOC 234—34/2
Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger, 2020, Art/Sensation Cube.
Art/Sensation works in relation with art and artists in exhibitions, texts and meetings. We aim to curiously investigate new aspects of how how the viewer can relate to art, rather than solely attribute meaning. We collect, explore and listen to situations and investigate how emotions can be rewritten and conveyed. Art/Sensation experiences and describes what emotions and bodily affect can be in and around art.
In 2021 Art/Sensation launched first exhibition with Tim Høibjergs work Hard Feelings in Cube, a virtual 3D exhibition space, focusing on activating the artist and artworks with sounds, lights and connections with social media. Art/Sensation has during 2022 been colobarationg with Index — The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Cube c/o Index, showing Linnea Hansander’s exhibition, TRAGEDY. I CAN’T LIVE IF LIVING IS WITHOUT YOU and with Cube c/o Nitja Center of contemporary art showing parts of “No Death, Just Respawn”.
Susanne Fessé is the founder and artistic leader at Art/Sensation, wich also involves Elin Mejergren as creative director and Caitlin E. Littlewood as text editor. We have an advisory board consisting of researcher Vendela Grundell Gachoud, artists Lundahl & Seitl, and curator Ashik Zaman.
Talking and writing about emotions in art and culture is one of the contemporary subjects around the world that is part of the so called “affective turn”. Art/Sensation works in the field of affect theory in art, which is at the forefront of research in postcolonial, feminist and queer studies, as well as in other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, technology and economics. Affect theory can highlight emotions and bodily affect in and around art and culture.
Art/Sensation invites institutions, museums and schools in the field of art and culture to collaborate in the form of exhibitions, meetings, lectures, and critique classes.
Cube
Cube is a virtual exhibition space that challenges conventional notions of how we can show art in a 3D environment, promoting interaction with the environment in order to discover the work. Sound elements are placed in different parts of the room and are activated by the visitor’s movements in the exhibition, while the light dramatizes the mood of the work. Visitors can discover more via links and create direct contact with the artists on social media or private message. Cube is developed by Art/Sensation and Untold Garden.
For institutions interested in using Cube please contact susannefesse@gmail.com
Previous exhibitions in Cube
Alexandra Larsson Jacobson
Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger, 2020
2 February - 9 March 2023
Art/Sensation Cube
HD video, digital installation, 08:39 min, loop. 2020.
Music: Mira Eklund
Curator: Susanne Fessé
Digital production: Untold Garden, Art/Sensation
Digital developer: Sol Sarratea
Form: Elin Mejergren
Text Editor: Caitlin E. Littlewood
Art/Sensation receives operating grants from Swedish Arts Council.
Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger
The video work Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger (2020) can be seen as reflecting the grey area in which love, tenderness, physical closeness, and violence exist side by side. Alexandra Larsson Jacobson’s work raises questions both about and how different stages of a relationship can manifest and the ways in which boundaries rapidly shift without us being aware of a presumptive shift in power. Is it play or seriousness we’re seeing? The characters in the video work try their hand at using each other’s bodies as instruments. The work can be viewed as a stage of what it has been like, what it is like, or what it could be like in a relationship. One person is the perpetrator and one a victim, or do the two characters play dual roles? The actors continuously switch places with each other, they show love that can also be interpreted as being suffocating. To want to hold on but at the same time let go, the desire to own another human being, but at the same time to play no part in the relationship. To both love and fear, everything fits in the work in a wordless choreography.
The lenses of our eyes, if tightened, can make our surroundings fuzzy. A camera can replace the viewer’s eyes and do the same with the depth of field; the technology so becomes part of our perception. We see blurred shapes of pink and blue circles, accompanied by suggestive music where sounds from the space are partially incorporated. We see parts of a home, small porcelain figurines, a piano, a chair. Or rather, symbols of a home, a doll’s house where everything is sparkly clean and coloured in the owner’s favour, pink and blue. Lastly a sculpture cast in steel, both rigid and malleable, taking on its stature at human height.
Two women move around the rooms, one younger and one older, their age difference difficult to determine. Both have blonde hair, wear black polo tops, pink pants and orange socks. The women embrace each other and hug seemingly too tightly. The tenderness between the characters seamlessly devolves into them holding onto each other too firmly, then again returns to tenderness. The interaction between them sometimes turns into physical violence, as one woman drags the other across the floor. The glances between them suggest otherwise, is it love, tenderness, friendship? Both players interact with the sculpture in the room, which moulds itself to their physical resistance. It exists between the bodies, is used as physical pressure, and at the same time is juxtaposed against a soft cheek. The characters’ long hair comes in between, the sound of steel rustling, like a fork pulling against a plate, a sound cutting through consciousness.
The lighting acts as a filter, a fiction and distance to a reality. The pink and blue colours add to this feeling as well. The title; Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger reflects the direction that Larsson Jacobson gave to the actors during the filming; - take harder, - caress softer. The work can be seen to be raising issues of violence, turning these issues into something we can talk about, albeit without having the right answers.
The video work is presented in a 3D environment that can be likened to a cave, a parallel reality, an inner world, which can only be accessed by the viewer at great magnification. The viewer, like Alice in Wonderland, follows the sound to descend into a shape, placed in a black cube. A room of its own, a cave where no one sees and no one hears what is happening between two people.
Alexandra Larsson Jacobson received a Master’s degree at Konstfack in Stockholm (2020) in art and a Bachelor of Fine Art from Umeå University (2012). She is also trained in Photography at the Photo School STHLM (2008). Larsson Jacobson’s background in dance has come to characterise her work as she creates encounters between human bodies, sculpture, movement and space that she describes as filmed performance. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad in Stockholm, Halmstad, Falkenberg, Umeå, Uppsala, Helsinki, Bangkok, Kiev and Bratislava.
Susanne Fessé, Curator
No Death, Just Respawn
Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art
08.10.2022-06.11.2022
Join us 8 Oct for the opening of the exhibition “No Death, Just Respawn” when we delve into the virtual and multifaceted worlds of computer games!
Artists: Petra Szemán, Tim Høibjerg, and the artist group The Gaming Department (Thomas Udomrat Hostrup, Jeppe Jørgensen, Taika Louhivuori, Dina Lundvall Nielsen, Ruben Ostan Vejrup, Oscar Yran)
“No Death, Just Respawn” is curated by Monica Holmen. The exhibition will take place at Nitja and online. The virtual exhibition is realized in collaboration with the digital platform ArtSensation c/o Cube and Untold Garden. Co-curator is Susanne Fessé.
Side events will accompany the exhibition, reflecting on the topics through artist talks, seminar, panel talks. Co-curator side events is Nicolas Hughes.
There will also be workshops for youth, and a specific workshop for the pupils in 7th grade at Volla school.
The exhibition is produced by Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art with generous support from Viken County Municipality, Arts Council Norway, The Nordic Culture Fond, Nordic Culture Point, and Fritt Ord.
Art/Sensation receives operating grants from Swedish Arts Council.
Tim Høibjerg, Bloom (2022), XR Sculpture.
Linnea Hansander
23 May–4 July 2022
Art/Sensation Cube
c/o Index
Digital production: Untold Garden, Art/Sensation
Form: Elin Mejergren
Text Editor: Caitlin E. Littlewood
Linnea Hansander’s artistic practice observes emotional situations and defines systems for a psychological communication understanding art as a channel. Installations, materiality and feelings become intertwined concepts to develop in a permanent dialogue with visitors of her exhibition.
Hansander’s exhibition, TRAGEDY. I CAN’T LIVE IF LIVING IS WITHOUT YOU will be shown at Index — The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm 19 May - 28 August 2022. The exhibition at Index has been digitally scanned and is on virtual display from 23rd May to 4th July 2022 in Cube at Art/Sensation in collaboration with Index.
Visitors at Cube find themselves in a parallel reality to the physical exhibition at Index. The virtual space will be filled with liquid, which with a digital suspended weight layer creates an additional dimension in the exhibition space. Sounds from different parts of the exhibition become apparent as the visitor moves within the digital space.
Read more about the exhibition TRAGEDY. I CAN’T LIVE IF LIVING IS WITHOUT YOU at Index here.
Hansander (b.1983) received an MFA from Konstfack in 2018. Her practice includes artistic projects, curating, performance, definition of spaces, collaborative situations and a constant flow of interactions with many agents. Her work has been shown previously in Sweden (Gerleborgs Konsthall, Intima Teater), and the exhibition at Index is her first important institutional solo show.
Index has a history of more than 40 years behind it. Firstly, with a focus on photography and publishing, and for the last 20 years with contemporary art as its cultural sphere. Index has been extremely important for the artistic context in Stockholm and the art world of northern and central Europe, however Index is not just history. We work with questions of the contemporary, using clear tools and formats. Marti Manen is the director of Index. Read more about Index here.
Finissage for TRAGEDY (I can’t live if living is without you)
28 August 2022, 13:00–15:00
Welcome to the finissage and last day of Linnea Hansander’s exhibition TRAGEDY (I can’t live if living is without you).
Two unique events will be taking place during the day. Starting at 13:00, there will be a conversation between Linnea Hansander, director Marti Manen and Susanne Fessé, founder and artistic leader of Art/Sensation. The conversation will focus on the virtual and physical aspects of exhibitional practices in relation to Hansander’s exhibitions at Index and Art/Sensation’s digital space called Cube.
Following the conversation, at 14:30, Hansander will conduct a performative reading of the play usually performed by automated puppets in the exhibition, after which audience members are also invited to participate.
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Tim Høibjerg
Hard Feelings
Opening 11 November
11 11 2021 - 12 20 2021
Curator: Susanne Fessé
Digital production: Untold Garden
Form: Elin Mejergren
Text Editor: Caitlin E. Littlewood
Hard Feelings (2021)
We are increasingly becoming more and more intimate with technology. It serves as an extension of our best and worst impulses such as healing (medical, social) or destruction (oppressive AI, weapons).
Hard Feelings explores ethics and morals, and the possible spiritual themes of advancing technology and artificial intelligence. What happens when machines will pass The Turing Test (The Turing Test, coined by Alan Turing in 1950, measures a machine’s capacity to demonstrate intelligent behavior, comparable to or indistinguishable from human behavior.)
Hard Feelings consists of sculptures of two loved ones made of hard surface materials forged together, frozen in a loving embrace but also formed as a powerful weapon. A juxtaposition of destruction and foundation that inhabits humankind. What crimes will we make these machines commit? When they reach a level of intelligence indistinguishable from humans, what are the ethical consequences of controlling these possibly sentient entities? The sculpture is placed on a platform with reliefs from Instagram, such as selfies and military equipment. A symbolic formation that gives the sculpture a heightened value (religious, gravesite, pedestal).
Tim Høibjerg was born in Kristiansand (NOR) and lives and works in Stockholm (SWE). He holds an MFA at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm (2021) and a BFA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, Norway (2019).
Høibjerg’s work takes place between the virtual and the physical, moving between digital software, animation, textiles, and sculpture. Exploring notions of fiction and reality, he aims to create tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between perception and interpretation.
Høibjerg describes his artistic method as such:
The decisions I make in my practice across the processes and techniques I use are closely linked to the content of my work. My workflow often comprises taking an object or subject from the actual world, scanning it before transferring it to 3D software, which allows me to perform experiments through the virtual realm. Manipulation of objects and materials in the 3D software embodies a sense of fantasy or play. The virtual environment is a means to create, manipulate and distort the natural world, serving as an analogical tool that enables reflection upon actual reality. Through printing, video projection, sculpture and textile, and digital interactive experiences, the final art works are now hybrid objects, made real through the artistic process. This approach creates a hybrid presence of both virtual and real worlds that allows me to question, explore, and undermine the binaries through technology and materiality.
Text by
Tim Høibjerg and Susanne Fessé
Artisttalk 25 November 6-7 pm at Konstnärshuset, Stockholm, Sweden with Tim Høibjerg, Artist and Petra Carlsson, Dean of the Department of Religious Studies and Theology, docent, senior lecturer at Stockholm School of Theology, University College Stockholm. The conversation will be moderated by curator Susanne Fessé.
Press-photos can be dowloaded for printed and digital newspaper and journals only.
Photocred: Tim Høibjerg, Hard Feelings (2021), XR (extended reality) digital sculpture installation. Photo: Press/Art/Sensation.