Jonas Dahlberg

Jonas Dahlberg is one of Sweden’s most prominent artists, working at the intersection of art, architecture and film.
http://www.jonasdahlberg.com

School Corridor, 1986

2010. Kinetic sculpture. Aluminium, steel, LED lamps, motor. Dimensions 135 x ø92.5cm


This work is something between a sculpture and a mechanical film. I’ve constructed a series of small, three-dimensional “film frames” creating a horizontal wheel, recalling a film reel. When the wheel rotates, the rooms are fed forward like a film in a projector, creating an animation. The rooms are constructed with imperfections and scratches so that the feeling of early animation mechanisms and early cinema comes to mind.

In the work I’m addressing an idea of how memories and film-animations have a connection to each other by the way they are similarly constructed. To be able to create an animation and an illuminated frame—or in this case a room—it’s necessary to always have a dark interval before the next frame/room. The illuminated image is then imprinted on the retina and is linked by the eye's memory to the ensuing room, creating a continued movement.

 

An Imagined City  (work in progress)

This October, Dahlberg will present a site-specific work on and around the old post office in Stockholm. The piece is an architectural sound and light installation produced by MAP, Mobile Art Production. During the restoration of the old post office on Nybrogatan 57, Jonas Dahlberg has transformed the building into an austere, black façade to use as his backdrop. In daylight, the temporarily blackened building becomes the archetypal image of contemporary architecture, only to be transformed into a seemingly black hole at night. When darkness falls, four windows light up and shine their spotlights down onto the street. The beams are filled with voices that take the viewer on a journey through cities, places and buildings, in stories that are based on an archive of memories of cinematic rooms and spaces. The austere façade, or the black hole, becomes a screen onto which the audience can project their own memories, thoughts and ideas regarding architecture and what a city could be.

Since the very beginning of his career, Jonas Dahlberg has worked with staged situations revolving around the viewer’s movements through spaces in different fictitious worlds. In An Imagined City, he deepens his interest in the mirroring of psychological architecture. To date, Dahlberg’s preferred medium has been film, but in An Imagined City, he leaves the medium behind and steps straight onto the street, where the viewer becomes the focus of events.

An Imagined City is a temporary staging of public space, a kind of theatre where everything is possible. What kind of city do we want? Which architecture is imaginable in the first place, and what happens when one temporarily dramatises a quotidian milieu?