Language game + "The moon makes up for it equally"

Language game
Megan Adie, Märit Aronsson-Towler and Lina Nordenström
7 September – 6 October 2024

Vernissage Saturday 7 September at 13:00–16:00
Artist talk at 14:00

Since the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein coined the term in his work Philosophical Investigations (1953), language games have attracted not only philosophers and theorists but also writers, poets and artists. By language games, Wittgenstein meant that words, sentences and representations get their meaning and stand in direct relation to the world we live in, the actions to which language relates and those who use language. The creative approach in a language is what makes it alive, and language has many more values than what is immediately comprehensible and graspable at first glance.

In Språkspel we invite three artists, Megan Adie, Märit Aronsson-Towler and Lina Nordenström, all three of whom use language as a starting point in their artistic work.

Megan Adie investigates the materiality of language where the paper and the book are in focus. In her works we encounter the handling of paper, the saturation of the pigment and ink in the material, the rhythm of scrolling. The language is compiled in various media, such as a series of flat codex forms, large-scale books and videos. The content can be based on parenthood, or a forest, or the sea, where you see a small part of the whole at once, and where the impressions expand as you move. She uses the book's slow pace to join individual letters into a coherent text in a perceptive rhythmic experience that is most closely related to music.

Märit Aronsson-Towler wanders and writes in different types of landscapes; both mountains, forest and big city, with a focus on the physical movement and the surrounding landscape. The excerpts, which she transformed into woodcuts, form a kind of glades in large forests with long paths of text. She has also followed her mother during the course of a dementia disease that first manifested itself in the fragmentation of speech. At the same time, another kind of language emerged, with abstract and rhythmic qualities. Is it possible to understand a text as an image instead of a coherent grouping of meaningful words?

Lina Nordenström approaches letters and words from aspects other than the obviously readable and immediately meaningful text. Methodically, she examines our alphabet, in that the letters have no meaning, apart from representing a sound. She likens the alphabet to a musical notation and visualizes typographic compositions that are not necessarily legible words, but the legibility of a visual construction, where she associates letters to sounds.

Poster image: Lina Nordenström

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In the project room:
Åke Carlström – "The moon makes up for it equally"
7 September – 6 October 2024

Vernissage with inauguration by Lars Cederholm:
Saturday 7 September at 13:00–16:00
Artist talk at 14:00

Tattered army, one-legged and mutilated tin soldiers. Wrapped heads, limping soldiers in perfect ranks, marching. Officers on horseback, unharmed – adorned with red rooster crests. Night in snowy landscape. The moon shines down on the earth as it always has and smiles in its own world, the star-strewn sky.

The father built landscapes for the son and with all his weekly money the boy buys more tin soldiers, bands, nurses, cavalrymen ……. The boy grows up, moves to Stockholm and goes to art school. Little brother at home plays wilder games. The tin soldiers are shot to pieces with stone ball and slingshot.

Now, many years later, only a small fragment of the large army the boy collected can be found in a box. With gauze, the army is now patched and plastered and set up in the studio. A painted disc is tilted behind, a plaster cast of a laughing face that has been on a shelf in the studio for many years is placed over the marching crowd. Over the years, the boy's play has been filled with other symbolism. The cold-heartedness of power, the reality of far too many. Unsought, it reminds Nils Ferlinsord; the stars settle it equally whether someone is born or dead.