Touch Me: A group exhibition in collaboration with the Stadsteatern (City Theatre)

In a time of stress and information overload on social media, the exhibition aims to remind us of the innermost core of art and culture – to be touched. What does it mean, how does it feel?

Touch Me presents six artists who, in their work with photography, video and film, create thoughts and insights about what is meaningful in our lives, both personally and socially. The exhibition aims to provide an opportunity for reflection and interpretation of what the works present us with.

Participating artists: Heba Y Amin, Aida Chehrehgosha, Snövit Hedstierna, Martina Hoogland Ivanow, Kent Klich and Lovisa Ringborg.

Heba Y Amin’s video installation Operation Sunken Sea, 2018, which is shown here for the first time in Stockholm, raises questions about patriarchal structures and colonial constructions, designed by men who at various times claimed ownership of the Mediterranean. The artist puts herself in their situations, plagiarizes their gestures and ideas, and at the same time wonders what would happen if an African Muslim woman were to make the same claims as her former male colleagues? The work spans history and lands in the present by putting today’s migration issues in focus.

Aida Chehrehgosha shows works from the series I can’t stop thinking, 2015 “… He is no longer here. We are no longer here. It ended. And I fall asleep with the black thoughts in the dark.”
The photographs – Black Thoughts process the anxiety that the darkness of the night creates and that Chehrehgosha stages in her art. A liberation from a trauma. In I can’t stop thinking are the recurring thoughts of someone, a child, disappearing.

Snövit Hedstierna’s Source of Values, 2016 reflects on the female body and society’s idea around it. All the charged values that it is held accountable for and symbolize without consent. The work consists of installation, performance and participation – Hedstierna takes the stage as an “object” and invites the visitor to wash away the unwanted values from the artist’s body with soap, water and a washcloth. The work was originally shown during the opening of the Manifesta11 biennale in Zurich 2016, and it is a photograph of the work that is shown at Touch Me.

Martina Hoogland Ivanow shows the work Early reading, 2018. By filming with a thermal camera, Hoogland Ivanow has investigated people’s need for closeness. As a whole, the project consists of documentation of social structures with different approaches to trust and fear. Heat shadows read the heat that people leave behind on the other person’s body. Martina Hoogland Ivanow’s art clarifies the touches that we crave and are threatened by.

Kent Klich has, through books and exhibitions, highlighted the situation in Gaza, both as a political and personal statement. Killing Time, 2011, consists of both a book and a film. The film is shown in Touch Me. It shows sequences taken from mobile phones, the films that were in the phones and that were the last thing the named people filmed before they died.
Judith Butler writes in the foreword to Killing Time “The image and life are linked, so when the film stops, one realizes that life has also disappeared. Perhaps the mobile phone carries the lost life in a way that the things in the house carry the lost body parts. In a sense, both the mobile phone and the broken furniture survive in one way or another when human life does not, charged, we might say, with a witness function.”

Lovisa Ringborgs work In the Belly of the Beast, 2014, consists of photographs that explore the unconscious by creating dreamlike scenes. The boundary between reality and fiction is blurred. The eerie thing about not knowing what scares or attracts. Staged works with references to Renaissance and Baroque painting as in Mirage. Echo who in the mirror cannot distinguish his face and in Unfolding hands play with a, happy, silky fabric.

In collaboration with Kulturhuset Stadsteatern (City Theatre).

Program and activities

April 27 18 – 24
Vernissage (Opening)
Arranged in collaboration with Kulturnatt Stockholm (Stockholm Culture Night).

While the house at Sergels torg is being renovated, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern (City Theatre) is instead located in over ten places around the city. Centrum för fotografi (Center for Photography) is one of the places where Kulturhuset Stadsteatern (City Theatre) appears during 2019.