Artist Gallery

Lisa Strömbeck, c/o Svenstrup, Dybbølsgade 34 st.th, 1721 Copenhagen V
lisastrombeck@hotmail.com
born 1966 in Andrarum, Sweden.
lives and works in Copenhagen and Tolånga, Sweden

Education
92-94 Freie Kunst, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg
94-99 The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
98-99(ws) Regielinie, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin/Babelsberg

Solo-exhibitions
2001 Resting place, Sparwasser HQ, Berlin
2000 Herstories tour, with Women down the Pub, Copenhagen
Hvilerum, Galleri Tommy Lund, Copenhagen
1998 Hemma - At Home, Galleri Box, Gothenburg
1997 Country, Galleri Campbells Occasionally, Copenhagen
1996 Jeg duer - I´ll do, with Andrea Creutz, Galleri Campbells Occasionally, Cph
A love inventory, The Garage, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg
1995 Loveliest, with Kristin Skanser, Galleri Saga Basement, Copenhagen
In and Out, Rådskælderen, Copenhagen

Group-exhibitions
2002 Coming! Zone/Mori Art Center , Tokyo
DK, Galerie de l`Ècole d`Àrt, Perpignan
A room of one´s own, with Women down the Pub, Secession, Vienna
Eukabeuk Event, Swedish art weeks, Chiangmai University Art Museum, Thailand
Je t´aime moi non plus, touring Kunstmuseum Thun, Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing (F), Kunsthall Bergen (N)
Museum het Domein, Sittard (NL), ESAP Perpignan (F), Leisure club Mogadishni, Copenhagen (DK), Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (D), Metronom Barcelona (E)
Der dritte sektor, with Women down the Pub, Kunstverein Leipzig
Kropp & Själ, Röda Sten, Gothenburgh
2001 Der dritte sektor, with Women down the Pub, Kunstverein Wolfsburg
Aftenskolen, with Women down the Pub, Galleri Signal, Malmö
Out of Space, Stalke, Copenhagen
At zero, Piacenza, Italy
Dansk Video Manifesta, Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen
Liste 2001, Kunstmesse Basel
Ideologia, Nordic Art 2001, Röda Sten, Gothenburgh
Art Cinema, Art Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main
Quality street, Galleri Tommy Lund, Copenhagen
Get that balance, K3, Kampnagel, Hamburg
My Generation, Atlantis Gallery, London
New Premises, Gallery Muu, Helsinki
SHOOT at Borås Konstmuseum, Sweden
SHOOT at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
Du er helt ny - du er retro, Danske Grafikeres hus and Trapholt Kunstmuseum
2000 www.sexogpenge.dk, with Women down the Pub, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
Wonderful Copenhagen, Stadtgalerie Kiel
Organizing Freedom, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
Aktion Koloni, Malmoe
Wir wollen daran glauben, Sparwasser HQ, Berlin
Liste 2000, Kunstmesse Basel
Stand Art - Nordic Live Art, Gothenburg, Sweden
Filmform - old school vs new school, Galleri Artnode, Stockholm
Big Torino - biennale arte emergente, Torino
9 fra det Kongelige Danske, UKS, Oslo
SHOOT at Living art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland
SHOOT - moving pictures by artists, Malmö Konsthall & Cinema Spegeln , Sweden
Inscriptions, Galleri Enkehuset, Stockholm
1999 Art Forum - Berlin, with Galleri Tommy Lund
Drawings, The Pineapple, Malmö
Blick - nordic art-video, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Motion studies, Brandts klædefabrik, Odense
Imbiss, video-screenings by Mike Ballou, Berlin
Videokunst, Politikken, Copenhagen
Roll-on, cinema Panora, Malmö
Private Parts, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Andebølle - Ama'r, openingexhibition at Galleri Tommy Lund, Copenhagen
Exit, Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen
Stockholm artfair, with galleri Tommy Lund
Videoprogramme, Galerie Voges und Deisen, Frankfurt am Main
1998 Spin-off, Filmhuset, Copenhagen
Bösartig, Kino Klick, Berlin
FF Videobar, Galleri Rotor, Göteborg
Nordic Nomads, White Columns, New York
Five danish artists, Galerie Frø, Berlin
Artgenda review, Stadtgalerie , Kiel
Presenting LAB, The Pineapple: projectroom by Torbjörn Limé, Malmö
Moviebox, North Udstillingssted, Copenhagen
Art Forum - Berlin, with Galleri Stalke
Efterårsudstillingen, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
What´s going on?, DNA Gallery, Provincetown, NY
Stadens Museum for Kunst, Christiania, with J Koester and P Fjederholt
Videorama - for lovers only, Depot, Vienna
Mail in Sweden, SubBau Networks, Gothenburg
Videorama - the Copenhagen special, Depot, Vienna
B&B Unlimited,Galeri des Archives, Paris
Artgenda, Kulturhuset, Stockholm
The Pineapple goes Goody Bar, Malmö, Sweden
Boomerang, Nikolaj Udstillingsbyggning, Copenhagen
Nuit Blanche-Scènes nordiques les années 90 , Musée d´Art Moderne, Paris
1997 Kælder, OTTO, Copenhagen
Frauen und Tiere, Offener Kanal, TV Hamburg
Nordisk Konstfilmtriennal, Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden
For eyes and ears, Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark
Insomnia, with Kvinder på Værthus, Kvinfo, Copenhagen
Zones of Disturbance, Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria
Stofskifte,Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark
Politisk Kunst, Kørners kontor, Copenhagen
Video-97, Fylkingen - Scandinavian music & intermedia art, Stockholm
Kvinder på Værtshus, with Creutz, Prip, Roepstorff, Seidler and Sonjasdotter, Cph
Easter-exhibition, project with Maria Finn, Tomelilla Konsthall, Sweden
1996 Full Frontal Video, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Filme, The Club, Frankfurt am Main
Hej, hvordan går det? Galleri Eat me, Copenhagen
Mission : Impossible, Bricks & Kicks, Vienna
Bank T.V, Bank, London and Manchester
Artsp@ce.dk
Up date, Turbinehallen, Copenhagen
Smartshow - Stockholm Artfair, with artnode/artspace
Convoy, Turbinehallen, Copenhagen

Other Projects

Founder of the feminist-artist-group Kvinder på Værtshus/Women down the Pub with Andrea Creutz,
Åsa Sonjasdotter, Katya Sander and Kirstine Roepstorff
Founder of the artist- group LAB together with Andrea Creutz, Katya Sander, Annika Lundgren, Maria Finn and Marika Seidler
Organizer of SHOOT- moving pictures by artists, a filmfestival for artist-produced film and video in Malmö Konsthall, Cinema Spegeln and restaurant Hipp, Malmö, Sweden february 2000. SHOOT on tour has later been shown at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Borås Konstmuseum, Tommarps Kungsgård, The Living Art museum, Reykjavik etc.


Bibliography

"Dossier Kopenhagen - Lisa Strömbeck, Kunstbeeld - tijdschrift voor beeldende kunst Nederlands nr 5 2001
"Lisa Strömbeck - A woman under the influence" by Rebecca Kimbrell, Katalog - journal of photography and video, spring 2001
"A lonely utopia", by Rebecca Kimbrell, NU No. 6/00
"Yours Truly" published by Recent Works, Jacob Fabricius
"En blund hos Lund" Politikken 9 juni 2000
"Man kæler da med kæledyr, også i soveværelset" by Rune Gade, Information 7/6 2000
"Foto-Art", by John-Øyvind Eggesbø, Free, juni-juli 2000
"Kunst: Når kæledyr knalder brikker" by Camilla Stockmann, Nat & Dag, juni 2000
"BIG Torino 2000 - biennale arte emergente" exhibition catalogue may 2000
"SHOOT - moving pictures by artists" catalogue for the filmfestival in Malmö feb 2000
"Exit 99" catalogue for Det Kongelige danske kunstakademis afgangsudstilling may 1999
"Nordic Nomads" by Andrea Kroksnes, catalogue Gallery White Columns, New York
"Artgenda retro" exhibition catalogue, Stadtgalerie Kiel -98
"Experimenter på Charlottenborg" by Simon Sheikh, Information 5/9 1998
"Presenting LAB - LAB presents", bookprojekt 1998
"Selvidentifikation og selviscenesættelse på 90ernes danske kunstscene" by Simon Sheikh, Øjeblikket 35/98
"Spin-off - dansk og europæisk kunstvideo i halvfemserne", The Danish Filminstitute 1998
"Nuit Blanche" by Simon Sheikh (about the danish videos) catalogue Musee dÁrt Moderne, Paris feb 1998
"Boomerang", exhibition catalogue, Nikolaikirke january 1998
"Virginia Woolfs værelse" by Tania Ørum, Øjeblikket 35/98
"Inserts" female danish artists on internet: www.artnode.dk/inserts"Hair", exhibition catalogue for "Zones of Disturbance" curated by Silvia Eiblmayr, Graz, Austria sept 1997
"Stofskifte" catalogue Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, sept 1997
"Work in Progress" by Gretchen Gasterland, s.cr.a.m 1/97
"Lisa Strömbeck - Country" by Kristine Kern, Øjeblikket 32/33 -97
"Moderne Kvinder" by Rune Gade, Information 26/7 -95

Lisa Strömbeck: A Woman Under the Influence

--a casual introduction to her works of the late ´90s

The director John Cassavetes once lamented that people, nowadays, die, emotionally, around the age of 21, and that his own body of work was designed as a 'roadmap' to 'help people get past 21...how to save pain ' One might say the same about Swedish artist Lisa Strömbeck: each work is an episode in an ongoing mission for serenity in eclectic, modern life - sometimes comical and self-ironic, always candid, but rarely cynical. Though firmly situated in present-day life, Strömbeck´s works have the same feeling of serendipity through ordinary living one usually only sees in classic films: even the greatest ennui, the sharpest pains, the deepest disappointments, and the most fantastic good fortune are all somehow worth it in the end. Every moment on film is the work of a woman with a great eye and a greater heart - and although Strömbeck herself would tell you that she is more partial to Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, I can't help but think she's got a poppier-Vincente Minnelli in her soul somewhere.

'I love music - sentimental things...Everyone is walking around with sentimentality...' Strömbeck explained the last time I visited her, in her Malmö apartment last December. 'But...' she added impishly, 'even I have a limit!'

Since the mid-1990's, Strömbeck has created art that is wry and self-referential, without succumbing full-ham to the lure of the lurid confessional. Her style tends to the documentary-snapshot, depicting a single day or moment in time (in works like 1999's One Day, or the comical Keen Competition, a collaboration with Andrea Creutz from 1997), or a brief study of 'way-of-life' (as in Man and Family and The Seekers, both from 1996). Although her stories are culled from real life, the complete storyline (or Strömbeck's motives) are never fully revealed, bringing her subjects into fascinating half-relief through their total - but only momentary - candor. Take, for example, her 1998 installation Imagine This, in which Strömbeck ventures into the cold Swedish woods with her father, where he pinpoints the location of old rabbit cages, gardens, an outhouse, and barn on the grounds where he grew up. As Strömbeck's father casually instructs her what to shoot, he curiously declares, at the end, 'OK - Let's go home now we have seen the misery...'; Consider also the 1995 piece Love Inventory, in which Strömbeck contacted all the men she had been in love with during her life (since the age of 7), then visited and interviewed most of them: a process which culminated in a 17-plate brochure and 40-minute-long video. In the brochure, each crush, or affair, is abridged to the size of a single paragraph, briefly describing Lisa's attraction, the trajectory of the relationship, then a prudent summing-up of its failure. The video features 9 of the men, responding with surprising frankness to Strömbeck's easygoing demeanor, on their expectations of love, women, and themselves. However, the tension of the piece lies in all that is unspoken between Lisa and the men in her life: there's a tense implicitness that they will discuss only 'so' much - hardly ever discussing their own past relationships directly. (Interestingly, it's through these modified confession of her subjects that the viewer comes to infer the most about Strömbeck herself, who never appears on film during the piece.) Since the Love Inventory, she has increasingly diversified her methods (as a frequent collaborator with Andrea Creutz, and the collectives LAB and Women at the Bar) and subject-matter (increasingly featuring dogs, including her own beloved circus-dog, Ivan, as characters in her work). But the blue-jeans 'Frieze of Life' feeling to Lisa Strömbeck's body of work remains a constant. Both Love Inventory and Imagine This use distortions of memory, accounts of relationships through time, and unarticulated emotional intimacies (whether with boyfriends or father) to great effect, and the use of video as real-time truth-telling device heightens this.

Another characteristic shared with John Cassavetes is Strömbeck's emphasis on improvisation and performance in everyday acts. 1999's En Dag (One Day) is an account of one woman's daylong trek through public transportation and the workplace, then back again, saying nothing but 'Hi'. Keen Competition, a 1997 collaboration with Andrea Creutz, is a satirical piece on the exaggerated performance of the maternal instinct, as Creutz and Strömbeck babysit a third friend's child, and attempt to outdo eachother for the distinction of being 'good with kids'. In the 1996 video piece Lady in Red(the granddaddy of her performance pieces), Strömbeck is featured in a red t-shirt and white all-purpose underwear furiously cleaning her apartment to the Chris deBurgh ballad of the same name. The lofty romantic notions of the femininity suggested by the song are lampooned heartily in the video - underlining the fact that an otherwise catchy song has no bearing on the reality of a woman's life at all. Moldy food is sniffed and thrown out, wan flowers in a window are spritzed with an indifferent water bottle, and an already spotless toilet is scrubbed with ferocity. Among other things, Lady in Red is easily the 1990's greatest tribute to obsessive-compulsive disorder: even the song itself as the odd character of a song you might listen to 27 times a day for a brief period in life. The cleaning initiative lasts only as long as the song (just under 4 minutes), and as the screen fades to black, the soundtrack turns to applause: a coy affirmation of the fact that, of all the daily performative acts in a woman's life, there is no audience for housework, and no great reward for a performance well-done. Of all her video works in the 1990's, Lady in Red is the only piece that features Strömbeck's body so prominently as a character in the psychological action.

'When I made Lady in Red,' Strömbeck explains, 'I was angry at that time - and I was listening to those songs. You want to be seen as a beautiful person, but I never would have shown my underwear today - I wouldn't show my whole leg today. If my body were making a statement now, it would be more playfulness... absurdity - with a lot of clothes! Just my hands or feet cuddling Ivan [her dog]...'

A bubbly popular-music soundtrack is one of the hallmarks of a Lisa Strömbeck work (she is a great admirer of Dolly Parton and the great women of American Country's Golden Age). Music is not only a mechanism by which she can underscore the pluckiness and charisma native to her works, but a subtle device to illustrate how popular music plays a deep, evocative role in the psychology of everyday life: in spite of the disparity between our everyday tribulations and the inflated, clichéd love-and-loss scenarios of popular music. Real Real Gone, an unexpectedly sad piece (and a great example of expressionistic documentary), from 1996, is a slow-motion pan of bustling passers-by in Copenhagen, taking scarce notice of the lonely person behind the camera. The soundtrack is the slow-hummed song Real Real Gone, which couples with the filmic perspective to create a work of total isolation, of everyday loneliness (Lisa's use of music in this manner as a psychologicalsoundtrack predates even Lars von Trier's). The 1996 piece Man and Family uses country-music classics, like Dolly Parton's Jolene and Lynn Anderson's rendition of Stand By Your Man to examine the changeable, evasive search for love with the perfect mate.

These days, Strömbeck's art, like her life, has undergone something akin to Zen with the arrival of Ivan, a Swedish circus-dog who can pirouette, jump through hoops, and loves to be filmed (for more on Lisa's life with Ivan, see Søren Martinsen's fantastic art-documentary Shadows and Magic). Through her filmed interactions with dogs, in pieces like 1998's God's Gifts, Strömbeck is able to subordinate and refine the strong psychological aspect of her earlier works by capturing a relationship on film that is not dependent on dialogue. The psychology of her most recent works (God's Gifts, and One Day, notably) is more metaphorical and laconic than before. She is able to say something about herself through documentation of her dog: and the consequent aesthetic in works like God's Gifts, is much more striking - almost still-photographic - in its nature than her previous works. Serenity in life, courtesy of Ivan's arrival, is reflected in Strömbeck's ease, aptitude, and prolificness with her video-camera (she produces several video works per week, and is never dry of ideas for what to shoot). Examined against her body of work to date, it's exciting to think what new avenues her video work will take in its 'roadmap' of modern consciousness.

--Rebecca Kimbrell Engmann
Katalog - journal of photography and video, Spring 2001.

vDossier Copenhagen - Lisa Strömbeck

In the tradition of Nordic Film and literature, such as the films of Ingmar Bergman, there is a focus on the small world, and its flows of desires and meanings in everyday life. Themes that are recurrent in the video and performance-based artwork of Lisa Strömbeck, whose work is at once intensely private and very public. Most of her works take their point of departure in everyday occurences - sometimes intimate, sometimes nonsensical - that are interwoven with the spectacles of popular culture and issues of gender, shot through with a large dose of melancholia and loss.
In Strömbeck's early videoworks, such as "Lady in Red", 1996, and "Keen Competition" (a collaboration with Andrea Creurz), 1997, we are witnessing an ironic and iconic displacement of the media-generated images of women into an everyday enactment here-of. In the latter piece, Strömbeck and Creutz are competeting over the attention of a small baby, and in front of the camera trying to be the best, most loving and lovely mother-figure - at once mimicking and circumventing television gameshows and reality programming. An even more obvious misé-en-scene can be seen in "Lady in Red", in which Strömbeck is depicted cleaning house to the soundtrack of Chris DeBurgh's romantic mainstream ballad. But whereas the song is a hymn to the romantic vision of the perfect, beautific womanhood, Strömbeck is instead seen at work, as a housewife or just ritually cleaning house after a break-up of a romance. And since the pictures are sped up the video gets a simultaneously hysteric and ironic feel to it. A vision of womanhood that is outside reprensentation is humorously constrasted with the classic masculine vision of woman as object of desire.
In her later videos, Strömbeck has stepped somewhat in the background as performer, and has instead replaced presence with absence: Loneliness and loss seems to be the subject of both "God's Gifts", 1998 and "One Day", 1999. A sense of loss that was always present in the work are not at the forefront of the actuality video "God's Gifts", that simply and enigmaticly shows the artists in the company of wild dogs on an otherwise deserted beach. The short 3 minute video ends with the dogs walking off, and has no dialogus, but only the actual sound of the waves, and captures a fleeting moment of minimal, but perhaps profound contact. A similar theme is central to "One Day", a video that departs from Strömbeck's earlier, minimalistic home-video aesthetic, by using multiple locations, actors and a filmcrew. In the film we follow one day in the life a young woman, where her only contact with other people all day is an occasional "hello". It captures the loneliness of contemporary work-life in the city, and is perhaps Strömbeck's most melancholic work: A musing on loneliness.
Strömbeck's recent video installation Hvilerum (eng. trans. "A Space for resting"), tries to find solutions to the above situation by creating a space of tranquility and rest. The installation involves the imagery of dogs, now a recurrent theme in her work, shown sleeping on four separate monitors placed around a bed in a dark and intimate space, where it was actually possible for the spectators to lie down and have a rest. Perhaps we can, then, also find solace in our solitude, Strömbeck seems to offer.

Simon Sheikh
Kunstbeeld - tijdchrift voor beeldende kunst, nr 5 /2001

BIOGRAPHY AND PROJECT DESCRIPTION
ARTWORKS