Lena Bergendahl "The Human Orchid"

Ystad Art Museum presents the largest solo exhibition to date featuring the artist Lena Bergendahl. The title work of the exhibition is the brand-new science fiction film "The Human Orchid," which follows a group of mysterious individuals in search of knowledge about humanity. The film is being shown for the first time now. In the exhibition at Ystad Art Museum, it becomes part of a large spatial installation where viewers move between the finished film and branches of the creation process.

For three years, Lena Bergendahl has been working on the film "The Human Orchid," which serves as the starting point for the exhibition at Ystad Art Museum. The film follows a group of individuals who appear to be human but whose behavior suggests something else. They seem to be interconnected through a kind of network or root system. Do they originate from the plant kingdom? Or perhaps from the world of technology? Through sessions that resemble psychological personality tests, their perception and orientation abilities are evaluated. Together, they undertake various investigations to approach knowledge about humanity.

Other main characters in the film are the bog and the fly orchid, a wild and very rare orchid that thrives in moist soil. The fly orchid, which grows in certain places in Skåne, has insect-like flowers and lives in symbiosis with another species. For a male digger wasp, the fly orchid appears as a female digger wasp. Unaware of the true nature of the fly orchid, it mates with the flower, thus contributing to pollination. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari describe this process in their book "A Thousand Plateaus," noting that the boundaries between insect and flower become blurred, with the flower becoming a bit more insect and the insect becoming a bit more flower. "The Human Orchid" deals with such blurring between forms of existence, about mimicking and thereby becoming a bit of something else.

At Ystad Art Museum, Bergendahl's new film is presented in a large spatial installation where the boundaries also dissolve between the finished film, its creation process, and the exhibition space. Alongside the new film and several standalone works from the same project, Bergendahl's short film "An Image of What You See" from 2021 is also shown. This film also navigates between different stages of what it is, shows, and tells. In "An Image of What You See," a filmmaker discusses the film she is working on. The film within the film is about a woman who loses her sight and receives a kind of visual prosthesis that affects her ability to navigate between her inner world and what is called reality.

With film, images, objects, and text, Bergendahl makes connections across scientific phenomena, philosophical models of thought, and references from film and literary history. In these connections, new stories emerge that, like the underground roots of the orchid, propagate in many directions.

The films are shown on a loop in the exhibition and are approximately 30 minutes ("The Human Orchid") and 20 minutes ("An Image of What You See"). Both films are in English with Swedish subtitles.

Curator:
Ellen Klintenberg, Curator at Ystad Art Museum

The exhibition is displayed on the museum's third floor.