19 June 2021–3 October 2021

Eli Maria Lundgaard – An Inside Within Another Inside

Marabouparken are pleased to present the first major exhibition with the Norwegian artist Eli Maria Lundgaard in Sweden, where both newly produced and older works are included. The exhibition An Inside within Another Inside is a teeming sculptural scene in which bodies – human and other –sound, intrude, transform and invite to both pleasure as well as unease. 

Lundgaard is attracted to the uncontrollable nature; to situations and experiences that exist beyond the rational and decipherable. Her works can be described as a series of associations that challenge the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the living and the non-living, the inner mental sphere and the outer common reality.

Is it possible to be in the exterior and simultaneously in the interior? Is what intrudes and breaks down at the same time what expands and enriches? Included in the exhibition are, among others, the video works Barbarian and A Home for Occupants. Both of the films examine organisms’ permeability and confluence. They portray an alienation of the familiar, in the gap that occurs between fact and fiction.

Eli Maria Lundgaard, Barbarian, HD-video, 2019
Eli Maria Lundgaard, A Home for Occupants, HD-video, 2020

The installation aslo contains a myriad of objects in bronze, wood, ceramics and soil, which through their form make up a physical sign language or a system of bodily code. Language and its logics play an integral role in Lundgaards oeuvre, as a tool to create, materialize and transform. Words, just as the surfaces and materials, are permeable, mutable and leaking. 

These sculptures embody life, activity and sounds. They inhabit the space, saturate it with their presence. Everything seeps and oozes. How can we relate to the feeling of sudden insecurity when established relations and situations change, disintegrate? In the exhibition Lundgaard gives expression to her interest in art as doubt, ambiguity, ambivalence and question. The intrusive and violent forges open a space for curiosity and community. 

The body’s movement in its surroundings and the movements within the body, change it. Everything outside of the body define its surface and interior – even the inside comes from without. In the encounter with art you become another.

Eli Maria Lundgaard, Travelers, 2018. Foto: Jenny Ekholm
Eli Maria Lundgaard, Outline, 2021

Eli Maria Lundgaard (b. 1989, Trondheim) studied at Bergen Academy of Art and in 2018 received her masters degree at Malmö Art Academy. In 2020 she presented the solo exhibition A Home for Occupants at UKS (Young Artists’ Society) in Oslo. In 2019 she was nominated to prestigious Pinchuk Art Centre’s Future Generation Art Prize and in conjunction to this exhibited at both the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv and in the 58th Venice Biennial.

Thanks to the Norwegian Visual Artists Fund (BKV), Nordic Culture Point and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.