Jonas Dahlberg - Weightless Space (2004)
Friday, January 4, 2008
The work was showed first time in conjuction with a solo show at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin. It has since then been prestented at exhibitions at Sao Paulo Biennale (2004), Busan Biennale Korea (2004). Herzeliya Museum Isreal (2005) and Dundee Contemporary Arts (2004) among others.
Jonas Dahlberg (b. 1970, Uddevalla, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm and Berlin. His video installations play with the notion of spaciality: how we perceive a space and how we inhabit it. Often filming architectural models, he creates complex interlinking of spaces connected by a unique perspective. This filmic gaze evokes contemporary panoptic systems: surveillance cameras and real-time imagery. Dahlberg’s works play on the poetic and the enigmatic: in ‘Interior Weightless Space’ (2004), a flower is seen floating in a dark room only lit by a dim glow filtered through a door left ajar. The title, borrowed from Italo Calvino’s book refers to his wish to build “a space which readers must enter, explore and maybe get lost in, but eventually find their way out of”.
Weightless Space is a film of a conventional, unfurnished seventies room, with a door slightly opened to a brightly lit outside. The film is projected on one of the gallery walls, creating the illusion of a slightly displaced spatial extension of the gallery room. What we see is a pot with a green plant slowly floating around as if in zero gravity. Watching this endlessly enduring film of weightlessness the viewer who is bound to gravity may perceive his own body as unusually heavy. Like so often, Dahlberg evokes a moment of deep estrangement by challenging our everyday experiences of time and space, that we so often take for granted. The room is a miraculous little world in itself, just like the souvenir "snow dome" clutched by the dying millionaire, in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, as he remembers his boyhood sledge "Rosebud."
Production still:
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