Bo Christian Larsson
Exile in Heartland
Exile in Heartland
€ 4
Bo Christian Larsson
exile in heartland
Dec 3, 2011 – Feb 12, 2012
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Bo Christian Larsson (2011), The Departed (Detail)
The Kunstverein Braunschweig is presenting new installative works by the Swedish artist Bo Christian Larsson (*1976 in Kristinehamm, lives in Berlin) in the Remise. Larsson’s spatial installations mostly originate from a kind of performative act or are implementations in space of his drawings. The combination of a whole variety of different materials and objects, such as animal skins, wax, wood, sugar, soil, crosses, tools, and weapons, give rise to a mysterious, threatening landscape that can be immediately and physically experienced by the viewer.
Bo Christian Larsson has already been represented in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe. In 2009 he participated in the prominent group exhibition Walking in My Mind at the Hayward Gallery in London and had a solo exhibition at the Magazin4-Bregenzer Kunstverein in Austria. In 2008/09, Larsson was the recipient of a grant from the Otto-Runge-Stiftung, Hamburg.
The presentation in Braunschweig is Larsson’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. It will be accompanied by a catalogue. Larsson directs his gaze at the depths of the unconscious. His drawings, performances, objects, and installations are therefore to be seen reflections of his own psyche and play with the relationship between internal and external, conscious and unconscious. His works are often gateways into parallel worlds linked to our own by means of symbols. Archaic, apparently magic objects from unfamiliar nature religions, such as crystals, feathers, knives, as well as natural materials such as wood and mud, are recurring elements in the artist’s performances and installations. Larsson’s repertoire of motifs feeds on Nordic Viking myths, subculture currents like Death Metal, as well as the dark symbols associated with sects.
In an integrated video, The Lonely Lunar (2011)—a stage-like installation in the Remise—shows a man chop-ping wood while standing with his back to the viewer. In a set rhythm, he throws logs into a continuously burning virtual fire at the other end of the installation. The lumberjack seems to be a kind of Nordic Tantalus caught in an eternal cycle. Mistconduct (A New(er) World Order) (2011) suggests a primeval skeleton. Completely robbed of its functionality, a wooden boat is standing on its rudders and becomes a manifestation of human atrocity: the undignified transport of slaves constitutes a sad chapter of the discovery of the “New World”. Beside it, The Departed (2011), an alienated statue of Napoleon, alludes to the distortions historical figures experience over the course of history.
The exhibition is being supported by outset.
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