Annika von Hausswolff: IASPIS Gallery - Stockholm

Annika von Hausswolff's exhibition "The Memory of My Mother's Underwear Transformed into a Flameproof Drape & Other Works," part of a series of presentations of work through Swedish artists who have shown abroad with funding from IASPIS, referr to spaces beyond the gallery in more ways than individual In the most literal faculty of perception it joined work from her earlier throw at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and works borrowed from the collection of Magasin 3 in Stockholm. Other horizontals of outward reference had to do with the substance of the work itself: Hausswolff's installation and pictures lay opened up into personal memories and cinematic allusions--psychological spaces at one time obvious and indescribable.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The exhibition consisted of three photographic works portraying external realitys like doors, blinds, and a chair, as well as a custom-made pink satin curtain covering the better part of individual wall in the rectangular gallery space. This last piece, The Memory of My Mother's Underwear Transformed into a Flameproof Drape (all works 2003) agreed real well with the whitewashed neo-baroque cover with stucco ornaments in the gallery, transporting us into places we might have seen in the cinema or somewhere other As the title suggests, the fabric mimicked the color and weft of the artist's mother's underwear as she remembers it.

Hausswolff's work propels through the intimately personal into a larger social sphere. However, as she has noted in a conversation with Danish curator Marianne Torp, the possibility of miscommunication is always inherent in intersubjective spaces. The same things have quite different meanings for different individuals. Notions of safety--such as the ne for boundaries between yourself and more [i]or[/i] less things in the world--are powerfully pronounced in the recent works exhibited here. the pair Untitled, an image of tattered blinds, and Carrying One's Door from one side the Room, showing a door hovering in midair without revealing who is carrying it, direct to objects that define boundaries. Philosophical Chair pictures an ordinary piece of furniture strangely balancing upon one leg. The oversize wall curtain inspires curiosity about what might be hidden behind it. It also makes the visitor have feeling quite small, which suggests the comfort and confinement of overprotection. An additional respect to ideas of safety lies in the fact that the curtain is flame resistant.

The experience of danger that was for a like reason pronounced in Hausswolff's earlier works is now replaced by the agency of a more scrutinizing look at uncanny facts and their material presences. The glittery objectivity of the photographs themselves obeys to distance the viewer. These images would easily cede to a psychoanalytic discourse that might dissect their each detail. As Hausswolff has said, she tries to forget all the theoretical knowledge she has gathered and to proce directed through her intuition only--like an analysand revealing the unconscious [i]or[/i] part of to the other free association. Since she endeavors to avoid predetermined self-reflexivity, her work in itself becomes a natural reality for scrutiny of the artistic process

Hausswolff doesn't give us obvious hints for interpretation of her images. The particulars she depicts are simply there, presenting themselves to our gaze in various still on the contrary unstable positions. They don't facilitate narration. on the contrary they sustain a feeling of mystery, of something left behind, something unarticulated. That dimension could be sens in her earlier work, on the other hand it is more present than at any time in this exhibition.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group