Green Light is based on works by the artists Fia-Stina Sandlund, Gisela Schink and Petra Trygg. Together with invited guests and audiences, the artists discuss art, gender perspectives and smart strategies on a late Saturday evening and night. These discussions are presented in the exhibition alongside works by the three artists, each dealing with gender in their own specific and unique way.
Fia-Stina Sandlund creates idea-based works that analyse power structures and concepts of normality. A social infiltrator, she operates within both the art world and the media. Notable works include her Gubbslem (‘Male Slime’) protest campaign against the Miss Sweden competition. She pushed for a place to be named after her intellectually disabled brother, and is the creator of the sound installation The Artists’ Club. The exhibition features her film Ten steps to the top – the how-to guide to art success (when born with wrong genitals), an inspirational film for young girls who want to become artists.
Gisela Schink uses the female body as a playground, and has often worked with female desire and the right to her own body. Her images of lubrication in the 1997 piece Oh – it’s a beaver have drawn widespread acclaim. In her work Jag orkar inte knulla längre. Vill du ha en väska? (‘I can’t fuck anymore. Would you like a bag?’), which consists of 300 bags, she pursues questions about female desire, sexuality and sublimation methods. Both works are included in the exhibition.
Petra Trygg draws and sketches with a young girl’s vocabulary. Her sketches consist of girlish, frenetic drawing from the little girl to the world of the old woman, often including elements of symbolic worlds that sometimes feature new-age inspiration. Shortly before Trygg graduated from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art in 2002, she was visited in her studio by a male artist who exclaimed: “But can’t you make it a little less feminine?” This is also the title of Trygg’s presentation on Saturday night. The exhibition includes an enormous princess, five metres wide.
One of the invited guests, literary scholar Kerstin Munck, will discuss her newly published book Giving Birth to Text: Hélène Cixous with art historian Anna Rådström. This is the first Swedish-language book about Cixous, the icon of French feminist theory who is known for her theories about women’s creation, birth metaphors and giving birth to text. In her book, Munch asks why Cixous’ concepts and metaphors are still met with such resistance. The conversation takes the book as its starting point, discussing the aspect of artistry that makes use of the autobiographical, while also transforming it into something else. The final talk of the evening – At the Heart of the Image, with Bildmuseet’s curator Brita Täljedal – begins at midnight. Täljedal highlights Hannah Wilke’s work by linking back to the retrospective exhibition held in 1999.
Produced in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and the Department of Literature and Nordic Languages at Umeå University.
