Wallstreet Festival: the sea is watching/ Dialogues – Another Place

the sea is watching by Anna Sofia Jernryd and Dialogues – Another Place by the artist duo SKYMMER OCH SER (Jenny Magnusson & Patrik Elgström) is a collaboration with Varberg Municipality for the Wallstreet Festival, which takes place during the summer in Varberg.

“the sea is watching“ is the fifth and final part of the series Borders. The photographs were taken on the Greek island of Lesbos, and the camera is pointed towards Turkey and one of the narrowest straits in the Mediterranean. It is ten kilometers wide, and hundreds of thousands of migrants have crossed it over the years, hoping to reach Europe.

The starting point for the work is a quote by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou: “Political violence increasingly wears the mask of meaningless accidents,” and highlights how political violence is often hidden behind a notion of nature’s capriciousness. By placing the gaze over the sea, the focus is directed towards how responsibility for human suffering is shifted from political decisions to natural forces, and Jernryd questions that narrative.

Jenny Magnusson and Patrik Elgström’s practices meet in the artist duo SKYMMER OCH SER. Magnusson works with site-specific sculpture, and Elgström with photography.

In their work, photography and sculpture meet in different spatialities, where they explore the possibility of thinking in spaces and making decisions together. Letting materiality, architecture, the limited format, space, time, and context lead. The photograph with its format, flatness, hollowness, and past. The sculpture with its immediate materiality and presence.

The photographs on display in Varberg are part of the DIALOGUES series, which is an ongoing artistic investigation of the city’s architecture, its materiality, and how one moves there. Through things, they examine rooms, place, city, and contexts via the camera as an extension of the body. Installations are formed and built; meeting the past and flatness of photography. The documentation becomes a combination of documentation, interpretation, and an artistic work in its own right.

With the work “Dialogues – Another Place,” they want to direct our attention, not change the place but rather point, filter to see something new. An orange plastic material becomes a seeing filter, a wooden board becomes both a tool to move with, part of a game, and an extension of our gaze. The hole in the picture points to another place – a picture in the picture.

Together with Varberg Municipality, a call for a temporary exhibition in Varberg’s urban space during the Wallstreet Festival was made during the spring.