Through the artist history breaks forth and in time she creates a context that is an artistry.

An archive, its objects and documents are sorted according to key-words, they are the signs that create constraints on understanding. They are also the signs of everything that cannot be found there.

When playing, reality is brought out of its game and into adventure. time becomes untimely.

As in the lockdown. When humans congregate into a common body and set something out of its game. they themselves are the condition for something not to continue. If one understands the world in such a way that is: If one understands something as changing.

Common man has a lot of respect for something and therefore does not want to influence it. “It is not realistic” is perhaps an underlying thought. Common man does also not exist an eternity: If one understands something as being part of constant change.

Once the artist said, “I cannot show an exhibition about strike and solidarity-movements if I am not paid properly, practice and reality become contradictory” and the negotiated reality became 5000 SEK plus VAT and the same for the artist following her.

This artistry is extroverted. It is not attacking in its nature, but per-severing and earnest. It seeks radical examples, it brushes up against them, and converses with them. It tries to be truthful towards them. It lets them speak at length, which is unusual.

At least one specific person and her accomplishments can be found in each and every artwork.

This artistry encompasses thousands of workhours, but most of the hours are unpaid hours as an artist’s work takes so much time. Especially when it comes to the persistant ones. How lucky then that art is a calling and not a real job. How lucky then that so much work can be found in 5000 SEK plus VAT.

We can also think about all the hours this artistry has paid the work of the workers, their adventures and the possibilities that these adventurers have upheld for us that followed. there are many that have been a part of writing this history. A whole lot. But there are not that many that remind us of it today.

It has not always been timely to be engaged in the work of workers. It is unfortunately never timely, some say, to put these historical values into practice. Especially not when it comes to claiming that art is work.

*

In the novel The World My Wilderness by rose Macaulay a group of children play in the hideouts from the resistance movement in the mountains. The war is over but they have a hard time adjusting to the routines of society. The become part of the ruins’ unrestrained landscape where ivy springs forth of its cracks.

The children live in the memory of the resistance that rests in this landscape, mimicked by these mountains.

The book reminds us how demanding it can be to identify with something that no longer is.

As time goes by it moves from flaming soft matter to hardened, identifiable form. As time goes by we forget how form appeared in movement.

It becomes an object for the archives, that we find through the help of the keywords.

This is why the children seemed most at ease in the ruins: they could not be found there.

In the room the artist has built scenes, after having listened to memories and recreated them. Made them even bigger, higher sounding and more attractive. She has arranged them in a manner that makes us see. An exhibition can be an act of grace. In relation to all the losses that might otherwise have taken place: on the shelves and in the archives. Especially in this room: a kind of archeology of childhood and the time from which it reaches. Whilst it is still warm.

Emily Fahlén, curator, author and teacher based in Stockholm