Excerpts from an interview by Power Ekroth from the publication Failure (2012), discussing the version of the show presented at AKS Art Centre in 2011:
(...)
Power Ekroth: Moving on, I would also like to hear about the exhibition 28th February 1986. This exhibition starts in a rather stripped down, boring, waiting room that could very well be the waiting room at the dentist or at an official institution of some sort. I believe it is a very common feeling to be ill at ease in a setting like this. As if this feeling was not enough, there was also a sound originating from the original sounds from the SOS calls from the evening of the 28th of February 1986 when the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot down and murdered on the open street in downtown Stockholm. A projection on the wall showed the public what was said in the transcribed tapes. The incident became a national trauma, not only because it was a brutal murder of an official person, but also because the self-projected image of Sweden was that nothing bad would or could happen here, that Sweden was a safe country. The exhibition continued, but I know that several people only visited this first room and didn't even dare to open the next door as if it was indeed a waiting room.
Mattias Härenstam: The waiting room is, however neutral in its design, a very emotionally "charged" environment. It is a place where you are no longer in control, you just have to sit there passively until you are called in and let the doctor or dentist get on with examining or treating your body. I was also thinking in terms of the idea of the welfare state-a mindset where each individual has to subject oneself to the order of a larger, well-organized structure. There was something with the nature of the voices on the SOS-tape: They start out with professional neutrality and gradually the shock of the event sets in and the facade cracks wide open. The initial denial and disbelief ("But it can't happen here. It is in Sweden we live after all") giving in to the horror of the realization of the fact and the shattering of the illusion of living in the safest of places where no evil could touch us. It was arguably the moment when the idea of the Scandinavian welfare state as a real-life utopia collapsed. This combination, of the waiting room and the SOS-recordings, was very important as a starting point for the exhibition. It did set the tone of it, and you're right, it was the feeling of an acute unease, when something you take for granted, as familiar and secure, reveals itself as being much more unpredictable and chaotic.
PE: The killing of Palme certainly killed a state of innocence in Sweden. If one can generalize, I would say that the Swedish people became more self-conscious too. I also kind of see the exhibition as one installation and would like to ask you if you yourself regard the installation as "one," or as different parts put together to form another completely different "one"?
MH: Well, I would say it was something in-between-they're all separate works and they will most likely be shown separately later on, but they were conceived with an idea of a coherent narrative. I was thinking a lot about the relationship between and especially the order of the work- how each new room you would enter hopefully would "deepen the plot." The layout of the gallery made it possible to dictate the order in which the audience would experience the work, in a similar way as the constructed rooms of The Diary of the Unknown Consumer did. It started out with the public space of the waiting room and the public shock and grief over the murder of Palme. Passing through the closed door you would gradually enter more and more personal spaces. After reaching the dead end of the turned-away crying man, you would have to walk back through the same rooms again, and maybe experience the same pieces from another point of view.
PE: But let us also move on to the next room before heading to the end, in which you had installed a video piece, Closed Circuit (2011), projected on the wall in a very dark room. I quote the description of the piece here, which describes the work very well I believe:
The video shows a quiet residential street somewhere in Sweden. The constantly moving camera travels down the street, into a large pothole at the end, is "swallowed" by a huge chewing mouth and turns up on the same street again. This time the street is darker and the sky red. The camera goes down the street again, down the same pothole that this time leads to a giant intestine, which "we" are passed through until we are back on the street from the beginning and the loop starts over.
Here we find the absurd, surreal and dreamlike state in which the self is engulfed in the mouth, going through the intestines, or womb, going through a rebirth, or being shitted out-either way we are going through some serious holes of pretty heavy connotations-and then hit it again in a very repetitive way. I find the work hypnotizing. Did a lot of people watch the only three-minute-long loop over and over again, as I would have?
MH: It has a kind of mesmerizing effect, I suppose. The monotony creates a kind of visual mantra that can capture or maybe even engulf you, similar to what I experienced sometimes with music. Closed Circuit started out with an image, a painting called In the middle of Sweden by Peter Tillberg from the early seventies. It shows this gaping hole in the middle of a quiet middle-class neighborhood. In my mind there was a direct link to the image of the bloodstain on the pavement after the Palme murder; it, too, looked and felt like a rift in an otherwise perfect surface. It seemed like a point of transition or a passage into something unknown. But I was looking for a feeling of a more circular entrapment, so I started thinking in terms of a biological circle-swallowing, digesting, shitting and then starting over and over again in seemingly endless repetition. It had something to do with a feeling of losing one's foothold and being drawn into this maelstrom where you are powerless. There is something terrifying, but at the same time very exciting with this "going with the flow," almost like riding a roller coaster.
PE: Losing control is indeed terrifying, and you said once that you are yourself a control-freak, but it is also something one must engage in to be able to gain ground in a way. Anyhow, I can't help seeing this work as a bit more nihilistic in its approach, or hopeless, you know, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" and all that? You mentioned earlier that your work has turned darker and that you are no longer "trying to escape"-is this what you mean by that?
MH: I don't really know-but maybe you're right, that the work could also be experienced as being in a state of apathy, as you as a viewer are being dragged around the continuous circle of passages with no will of your own and without those little glimpses of hope for change of the earlier pieces. Like being stuck in a huge machine that just keeps going and going.
PE: Then there was the room with a large installation shaped like a lamp, or rather a chandelier, made out of a root from a tree. Can you tell me a little more about this piece?
MH: Cannibalistic Solitude (2011) was in many ways the odd one out in the show, and that was largely my intention for it also. The installation of the waiting room and Closed Circuit had this link, a logical connection if you like, and I wanted to break it up in order to make the viewer stop and question what she or he thought they had understood. The sculpture was an oak root mounted in the ceiling, showing only what you would see of a tree if you were buried underground. This "subterranean" perspective was also in a way a continuation of going down the hole of the preceding video. On the root itself there were little lamps, crystal in chains hung from it as from a chandelier, and placed below it on the floor, a Persian rug: All details implying a bourgeois, homely setting and in that sense marking a shift to the private away from the more public space earlier. But there was also human hair "growing out" of the root, and I had this crazy idea of creating a kind of "voodoo-antenna" in order to communicate with the dead. Anyway, I feel that it does have an eerie and somewhat threatening sense of beauty about it with the large dark and chaotic shape hovering above your head.
PE: After such a surreal experience you led the visitor towards the end, the final room that we spoke briefly about. Yet another video-projection is on display here, and one can only see the back of a grown man looking out of a window, sobbing and crying. The angle of the camera is placed from a low perspective. Here one can't speak about fear any more; here it is a pure state of anxiety or "angst." The control is lost...
MH: Portrait of a man reminiscent of my father (2011) was maybe the least "spectacular" work of the show, but to me it was the central, core piece. And I agree, it is a portrait of naked angst in a rather unrefined and raw form. But again the perspective and the placing of the onlooker were of great importance. The low camera angle and the "too high" mounting of the projection in the room make this man a giant, or put you as a viewer in the position of a child looking up at an adult. I was interested in the contrast between his broad "fatherly" shoulders and his utter helplessness. The experience of a child realizing that the authority, like your parents, that you look up to for safety and guidance, are just as lost and helpless as yourself. This collapse of the illusion of safety in a private sphere had a connection to the shock experience of the Palme murder in a public context. I read an article once about Dostoyevsky seeing the painting Body of Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the younger. According to his wife's memoirs Dostoyevsky was absolutely mortified by the very naturalistic depiction of Christ (whom, for a deeply religious Russian orthodox man like Dostoyevsky in many ways, was more a god than a man) as just a corpse, very dead and with no visible hope for resurrection. He later stated: "One might lose one's faith when beholding such an image." These experiences when our constructed view of the world collapses, when chaos disrupts the ordered structure, was the theme I was following, or as one of the switchboard operators on the Palme SOS-recording says: "And when it first starts then, then soon there will be anarchy all over the world. So fucking horrible."
PE: Where does one go after one's world has collapsed? How did Dostoyevsky cope in his works? How do you find that the Swedish/Scandinavian society moved on after the death of Palme? And how are you yourself moving on after "painting yourself into a corner" with this nearly nihilist "closed circuit" like this? What are you working on now, and what is your next project?
MH: That's a damned good question or set of questions-I don't know, but I think that each collapse is followed by just a very brief moment of staring down that black hole of meaninglessness, and then you get on with reconstructing your world again. The prospect of staying in that state is just too terrifying, and would be the equivalent of a serious depression, I suppose. But the memory of it lingers on, and Dostoyevsky is said to have written his, if maybe not best, arguably most intriguing work, The Idiot, partly based on the experience (the painting also turns up twice in the book, both times playing a crucial role in changing the turn of events). As to Sweden post-Palme, it changed the idea of being a role model to the world, becoming more of an ordinary little country on the fringes of Europe. Not so much trying to export values anymore, but still self-content and fighting desperately not to lose what we've already got.
(...)
