Lisa Torell’s exhibition scrutinises components of the welfare state. The works reveal how care and attention, indifference and neglect are manifested materially in and through our urban and public spaces. It is as if she is asking herself: What is it that makes a society a shared space and a society a society?
With a close examination on site, working day and night, Lisa Torell discovers signs of care and consideration, and a lack of the same. She is the body and the eye, making her discoveries simultaneously with the viewer. Bit by bit, society and systems are laid bare, in paving stones, detritus and imprints.
For more than a decade, the artist Lisa Torell has focused her artistic practice on public and semi-public spaces. She uses a site-specific approach to enter into close dialogue with chosen places and situations, individuals, population and society. At Marabouparken works made between 2015 and 2019, for places in Istanbul, Norrköping, Småland, Gdansk, Sundbyberg, Tromsø och Venice, are shown in a large-scale spatial installation.
Lisa Torell works with performance, installation, video, and text. Several of the works shown at Marabouparken were produced within the framework of the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, for which she presented her thesis Potential of the Gap, in spring 2018. Her practice explores issues related to the public sphere, focusing on relations between place, language and identity in relation to perception, convention, system and logic.
During the exhibition, Lisa Torell will be conducting a parallel programme, which began with the project and book Place to Place, 9 artists reflection about site-specificity and place-related processes (2016-2017), in which she discusses practices and methods with other artists.
Curator: Maria Andersson
Lisa Torell (Gothenburg, 1972) is a senior lecturer at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art and Creative Writing. She has exhibited widely in group shows and solo shows, at venues that include Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, 0047 in Oslo, TSSK, Trondheim, Research Pavillion, Venedig, Bonniers konsthall, Stockholm, Index, Stockholm, Göteborgs konsthall, Gallery Depo, Istanbul and Consonni, Bilbao. Torell has also written for various publications such as Contemporary Urban Structures, Oslo Pilot (2015-17) – a project investing the role of art in public space (Mousse Publishing), Paletten and A-Prior Magazine.