OBS!

As part of the third year of the Bachelor’s Programme in Fine Art, the students have been given the opportunity to exhibit together, outside the walls of the school, here at Marabouparken’s Project Room and Library. The exhibition takes place in parallel with their individual exhibitions at Konstfack. The collective and the individual works are brought together, allowing them to encounter and respond to one another.

The title the students have given their exhibition is OBS!

A short word, an instruction, an interruption. OBS! An exclamation mark in the flow.

Pay attention to this.

The title directs attention towards the act of seeing itself, and towards the exhibition situation as a place where gazes meet. Who sees? Who is seen? What comes into view only when someone directs their attention towards it? Encountering a work of art is never entirely passive. To see is also to participate. Attention is not neutral: it selects, frames, magnifies, and leaves something else in the shadows.

Perhaps OBS! is therefore also a question.

Working outside the protected space of the school also means encountering the world as it is. Something has to be done here, precisely here. It is often then that problems arise. And with problems come decisions and reconsiderations. Knowledge also emerges from not knowing, from what has not yet taken form. What appeared to be an obvious meaning can suddenly begin to shift.

The exhibition brings together fifteen students in their final year at Konstfack. Fifteen different practices, fifteen ways of seeing, making, thinking and doubting. Knowledge emerges between them: between people, materials, technologies and institutions. In that strange space in between, where something has not yet been determined.

Many of the works revolve around the experience of living in a time of rupture. A time increasingly narrated as an ending: the end of democracy, the end of capitalism, the end of the idea of an infinitely habitable planet. But the stories themselves also seem to have broken down. The old futures no longer hold.

How do you tell stories when the future no longer feels like a continuation? When what lies ahead cannot be described with the words we have inherited?

These are artists who do not seem to trust simple answers, or language’s need to divide the world into opposites. Instead, they move towards the cracks, towards the unclear and contradictory, towards places where several things can be true at once. Their works do not attempt to explain their time from the outside. They remain within it. They explore what can be done when the world can no longer be described through the stories that once held it together.

Fifteen artistic practices, different in materials, methods and forms of expression, yet united by a desire to understand the world they find themselves in — and to change something within it.