Exhibition view, Arvika Konsthall 2010

Drawings
crayon on paper, 50×70-100×150 cm
See MORE of the drawings

Slide projection installation: Along the Seashore
70 slides version, loop, size variable

Video: Unfinished Harbour (Narcissus) 2008
05′00” HD 16:9
with text by Torbjörn Säfve
camera Markus Öhrn

See MORE about Unfinished Harbour (Narcissus) and the Myth Trilogy

A selection from a series of porcelain objects and scenes 2009-

Wading Waters 2009
porcelain 20×40x10 cm

Near Earth Object 2010
porcelain, wood, slide projection

Disappearance Book 2009
Homage to Baudrillard
11 porcelain tiles
glazed with Baudrillard quotes, felt
10×15x15cm

Treeline 2009
porcelain 5×5-8 cm, charcoal on wall

Moons 2009
Series of 11 porcelain moons
each individually glazed with  names of
the seas and lakes of the moon
15 cm in diameter

Near Earth Object II 2009
porcelain, wood, side projection

Along the Seashore 2008
slide projection loop 70 slides, size varialble
Installation view from The Other Tiger II, Arvika Konsthall (SE) 2010

Temporary work in public space during Open Art, Örebro (SE) 2008

4×10 meters colour photo printed on canvas and mounted on house wall

2 person show with Malin Abrahamsson

2009

Etta Säfve:
Fathoms, wall drawing 2×10 meters charcoal
Bull’s eye, wall drawing 10×15 cm crayon & slideshow on LCD screen, 30 images loop

Malin Abrahamsson:
Double Happiness, detail, Acrylic on wall, polyester flags, string, plastic shag carpet
16′ x 40′ x 16′

            Zenith is a two-person exhibition of site-specific works concerned with our relationship to the sun, on display in the soaring locales of NY Arts Beijing through the end of June, 2009. The artists, Etta Safve and Malin Abrahamsson, arrived in Beijing for a joint artist residency earlier in the month, and they regard this as the result of a collaborative project based on their shared philosophical interests and closely related artistic practices. While Etta is concerned with concepts of fluency and time, and Malin makes observations on material and ethereal spaces, and so in a way one can claim that this is a display of temporary territories; the undefined demesne barely discernable in the backstage area of daily life and human existence.

A one-time surfer, Etta’s largest piece in the show, “Fathoms”, is a sweeping charcoal drawing made directly onto the wall. Depicting a 10 meter wide quiet seascape, it is complete with a score of surfers sitting on their boards in a perpetual state of unconditional waiting. To the far right, a bright sun has etched away the charcoal of the drawing, making the default white color of the wall appear almost blinding; possibly a commentary on both natural and man-made cycles of change and disruption, this work rests in the no mans land between nature and culture.

Opposite Etta’s work, in a piece titled “Double Happiness”, Malin has strung several long pennant banners, decoratively crisscrossing and partially covering a subtle wall painting with a sun resembling a faint bull’s eye that is several feet in diameter. Created from numerous, cut-up Chinese flags, the banners equally recall visions of American car dealerships as monochrome Tibetan prayer flags, and where they spill out onto the floor, large circles and shapes of dogs meet up in a deliberate but playful composition in red. These symbols, frequently recurring in Malin’s two-dimensional works, here get ample room to perform a careful balancing act between humor and politics while remaining visually seductive.

On a closer look it becomes clear that both circles and dogs are hand-cut from an inexpensive plastic carpeting material for sale at the local markets. In sharp contrast to the industrially manufactured art so prevalent in contemporary China, Malin’s work, despite its graphic and controlled aesthetic, call attention to the unplanned imperfections that are a natural part of the process when one creates by hand, and offers an intimate link between artist, work and viewer. This quality is also visibly present in the works by Etta, whose panoramic charcoal drawing speaks of intense physical labor, but also of the choice of manual execution over reproducible slickness. In her second piece “Bull’s Eye”, a frieze of several postcard sized charcoal images, the repeated sun commands a massive white wall on their own as if to dare you to question their scale or right to exist for only a few days. Zenith, like the works in this exhibition, is a very temporary phenomenon, after all.

            Perhaps the best way to simultaneously approach the visually very different works in this exhibit is to imagine a diagram where time is represented by a horizontal axis and space by one that is vertical: firmly rooted in space and atmosphere, Malin’s large-scale installation holds forth to the viewer the same capricious silence that is so intimately depicted in Etta’s fluid seascape. This might also be the true Zenith of this exhibit; the exact location where space and time for a brief moment share the same meaning. 

NY Arts, Beijing

June 2009

Slide series of drawing sequence, with slide viewer, in wooden box
Edition 10/ each title
numbered and signed 2009
Sunset
Wave

Set in the intersection between nature and culture, in The Reversibility of Things, a man on a frozen sea performs an act that creates a surge larger than he can predict or control.

press play to see a 01′45” Quicktime excerpt from the film

 Click here to view the embedded video.

 
Stills

2009

The Significance of a Name
(Veiled/Unveiled)

Departing from a single drawing titled “self portrait with cigarette” this work later turned in to its final form,
an animated single channel video loop titled “ The Significance of a name (Veiled/Unveiled)”.
In the work the intensity and pace of the glow from a cigarette or a radiant breath determines what we see and for how long.
A work on seeing- the self and others. On perception and boundaries.On what we want to see and how long we are prepared to look.

see a quicktime of the video HERE - Click here to view the embedded video.

2008

Stills 

Exhibition view Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam         Exhibition view, PlanB projects, Amsterdam
8 individual drawings, 8 mm film on DVD,               Drawings on paper and directly on wall, Slide projection loop, 45 slides
Snowfall 04′50”, rear projection, no sound               8 mm film on 2 LCD screens, Waiting (Wish) 01′00”

Drawings on paper and directly on wall 2008                      detail

Stills

2008

There were seasons when the sun never reached above the horizon.

STILLS

Unfinished Harbour (Narcissus) 2008
HD 16:9 06′00”, Stereo

North Sea:Low tide (Ophelia) 2006/07
HD 16:9 05′28”, Stereo

Unwavering (Sisyphus) 2006/07
HD 16:9 04′11”, Stereo
Stills

Unfinished Harbour (Narcissus)

Unwavering (Sisyphus)

catalog text;

Changing Matters, the Resilience Art Exhibition

Museum of Natural History, Stockholm 2008

by Frida Cornell

A pointless act or a ceaseless urge, a must.

What brings our actions to life is not always clear, sometimes even to our own selves.

Etta Säfves video piece is permeated by a silent determination, where nothing can halt what is happening, or understand its scope.

A man performs ritual like movements, or just walks without further ado, straight out into the ocean, to be engulfed and disappear.

The piece Unfinished harbor (Narcissus) is shown in Changing Matters- the Resilience Art Exhibition.

It is one part of a roughly connected trilogy of films, which can be seen on its own, as in this case, or coupled with the two earlier pieces North Sea: Low tide (Ophelia) and Unwavering (Sisyphus). All three border on the same experience of timeless being.

In Unfinished Harbor (Narcissus) the landscape is undefined, season: winter, perhaps early spring, a lone man paddling up a stream. He goes ashore and starts attaching blue birds to the trees. The subtitle Narcissus- from the Greek myth about the man who fell in love with his own reflection and finally died of thirst by the lake where he sat, because were he to drink, the image of him would be shattered into a thousand pieces- alludes to mankind’s vain ambition to ensnare and be one with nature, our own effigy. The pictures are accompanied by texts by the author Torbjörn Säfve.

As in earlier pieces by Etta Säfve, unfinished Harbor (Narcissus) is closely interconnected with mythology and literature. In using Etta Safves words one could say she deals with conditions and intervals. As if everything apart from that which we see, suddenly just stopped; an instant filed with equal parts longing and inexplicable movement.

Exhibition view, Unfinished Harbour (Narcissus) 2008

Changing Matters

Museum of Natural History, Stockholm 2008