On February 8th a solo show with the Swedish artist Alexander Gutke opens at Marabouparken Annex. Significant for Alexander Gutke’s artistic practice is a material self-reflexivity, where the works, busy chasing their own tails, manages to create a larger, parallel story. Everyday objects, technology and abstract narratives are transformed into installations for reflection over their own inherent qualities.
The audience is led into the exhibition by the wall drawing Horizon (2001); a work that with simple means creates a “mental horizon” for our experience of time and space. A several metre long number comes to an end with a laconic “dagar” (“days”) through which it creates a comprehensible frame for the unfathomable. Similarly, the slide projection Lighthouse (2006) stretches our established way of perceiving the dimensions of a room by creating a picture plane that seems to extend beyond the surface of the wall. Alexander Gutke often repeats an event or a section of an event and lets it loop in a “time-space” of its own. In The White Light of the Void (2002) we follow, over and over again, an empty film that gets stuck in the projector and melts in the heat of the projector lamp. The melting film is a familiar way of communicating a feeling of nostalgia, loss or the end of an epoch in film. In 9 Ways to Say it’s Over (2006) the artist again shows us how our relationship to reality is shaped through images. A series of “The End” signs from films from the 1920’s and onwards in a number of languages speaks of the universal in the experience of a romance or a loss. The “The End” signage, however obvious it may seem today played a huge role in defining how our experience had come to an end. The film arrives at its final narrative destination while the psychological room created between the viewer, the characters and the story continues to live a life of its own. In Exploded View (2005) this self-reflexivity reaches a crescendo with a slide projector that seems to ponder its own interior and its own projection. This is the tautological artwork par excellence; a projector that shows its own insides in a slideshow, while at the same time managing to transform the images of its own components into a fantastic journey into the microscopic.