ON THE VERGE

Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden, 2022

 

With work by:

Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski

Michael Fink

Linnéa Gad

Adele Kosman

Abigail Lucien

Kelsey Shwetz

Yevgen Samborsky

Erik Thörnqvist

Noa Sköldin

 

Vernissage performance by Adele Kosman

IN performance by Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski

 

Curated by Lauren Johnson & Jeanette Gunnarsson

Pictures by Jean-Baptiste Béranger

 

Our contemporary Zeitgeist holds infinite information and imagery. We collectively doom scroll through social media in a state of communal hypnosis, our feeds filled with life hacks, climate emergencies, cat videos, the war in Ukraine and celebrity gossip. The horror of man-made chaos and brutality mingles with mindless escapism. Somewhere in the breakdown of all we thought we knew, the eerie stillness of the world shutting down in 2020 was exit-ed to the burning hot and deadly flames of wildfires that rage all over the world. Dark rain clouds finally brought long awaited rain, but they were filled with black soot and didn’t last long. While the heavens opened up, water swallowed a whole country on the other side of the planet. The state of our world feels dark and desperate, but is there still hope? Does utopia unfold somewhere? What does our imaginative collective conscience reach for?

 

On the Verge brings together a group of diverse and multidisciplinary artists asking urgent questions. The exhibition presents artists as myth builders and storytellers of our time, imagining and re-imagining our relationships with each other, death and mortality, digital realms and our ecological habitats. We find ourselves and our planet in a liminal space, a threshold between one destination and the next, in a period of ambiguity, disorientation and transformation. Where will we end up? Perhaps if we learn to reevaluate our hierarchies and priorities, caring about a wildflower as much as a mother, making room for all kinds of lives and thinking through deep time, our current purgatory will lead to a bright and sustainable future. It’s up to us.

 

Text by Lauren Johnson & Jeanette Gunnarsson