Frontpage   Stine Høholt : CLOCKWISE ­ New Nordic Contemporary Art ­ Introduction THE NINE CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS featured in the CLOCKWISE exhibition all work in extension of late 20th-century neo-conceptual avant-garde currents. At the same time, in highly different ways, they debate tendencies and currents in cultural development, relating to what, in a threadbare phrase, is known as "globalization". While firmly anchored in an art-historical tradition, they venture into an expanded cultural field where artistic practices target anthropological and sociological issues rather than aesthetics and form. Whether melancholy or humorous, the works constitute an ethnographic mapping of cultural fields that, directly or indirectly, have been shaped by a new, international order. They deal with the effects of globalization, not just on society as a whole but on the individual. The works in CLOCKWISE let cultural mobility, deficient identification and fleeting encounters coexist with various forms of "introversion", focusing on personal memory, on attempts to forge identity from a diverse and conflicting cultural heritage. Other forms of introversion appear in works that appropriate the often parodic-platitudinous9 8 traces of an "own" culture or investigate the uniquely Nordic at a time when it no longer constitutes the self-evident source of individual identity. The exhibition shows a differentiated Nordic space in the contemporary visual arts. The works were selected to display diversity rather than uniformity, both with regard to the range of media and the diversity of cultural perspectives. But above all, the artists show different ways of relating to today's mobility, internationalization and the new subcultural communities that are emerging as traditional national and cultural ties become relativized. AS ANY LOCAL NEWSPAPER READER will know, a growing cultural exchange is taking place between the Nordic countries and the rest of the world, not least by way of immigration. Equally important, though less debated, is the temporal and spatial "truncation" produced by cultural and ­ especially ­ technological developments over the past 50 years. Mass media enable a global brand-name culture with associated pop and sports icons to imprint our consciousness with hitherto unforeseen force. Meanwhile, subcultures of various sorts are blurring affiliations to geographic-cultural regions ­ techno and hip-hop cultures are the most visible examples of this but far from the only ones. In this sense as well, the Nordic region has become part of an overriding global reality. In the Nordic countries, "ethnicity" and "cultural identity" have mainly been defined by the political right, in relation to refugees and immigrants. Bluntly put, the Nordic countries have been looking down their nose at a perceived threat from the south. However, today's political reaction does not just take aim at globalization's mobility, it is equally directed at modernity's erosion of cultural communities. At issue is often a critique of modernity: people reacting critically to society's rationalization, disciplining and increasingly incomprehensible structures by harking back to pre-modern communities or looking outward to the new subcultures of globalization. In that regard, "the old North" was a nostalgic vision already before immigration kicked into high gear in the 1960s. However, there has been very little looking within, to the indigenous Nordic identity, or to the side, to international youth and subcultures, in discussing the effects of globalization on the Nordic countries. They, too, should be included in the debate of how cultural identity is changing within a Nordic context. In what ways does cultural globalization challenge, enrich and alter our Nordic identity and affiliations? There are no easy answers to this question, especially if one has only a vague notion ­ or perhaps none at all ­ of what is genuinely Nordic "in itself", as the case is with the several generations now that have grown up with American music on the radio and Chinese slippers on their feet. The exhibited works point to the need for a cultural self-reflexivity, an act of questioning oneself and one's culture, with no prepackaged answers in stock. Moreover, in these artists' self-reflexivity lies an opportunity to glimpse the differentiation and nuances of the Nordic identity. And, accordingly, the potential, within an art context, to add facets to the debate about immigration, subcultures and the new internationalization. CULTURAL SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND A MELANCHOLY MAPPING of certain contemporary cultural environments characterize the work of Finnish photographer Jouko Lehtola. As featured in this exhibition, Lehtola's series Marked Skin presents some of Finland's most heavily tattooed people and what most would likely consider a grotesque urge to decorate and mark oneself for life. Whether young or old, Lehtola's tattooed people share the transgression of the human body by piercing and tattooing. As someone's individual bodily boundaries are overstepped, he also enters a subcultural community. By no means is it a specifically Finnish phenomenon but part of a global subculture, a way of creating new affiliations in times when older communities are crumbling. The desire expressed in piercing and tattooing culture, to arrive at new forms of "authentic identity", surfaces in a world that is anything but authentic and homogeneous, in which traditional points of identification are under threat. In other series of photographs Lehtola has reported on society's fringe groups: in Young Heroes (1995-96), teenagers and their drunken binges. Or other young people farther on the margins of society, as in his latest series: detached exposures of burn marks on T-shirts and jeans left when the young drug abusers dozed off from the numbing effect of heroin. Jouko Lehtola's mapping of different subcultures shares a kinship with the photography of Norwegian artist Torbjørn Rødland. In his BLACK project ­ on exhibit for the first time, like much of the other work in CLOCKWISE ­ Rødland investigates one of the Nordic regions´ most extreme and controversial subcultures: the death metal music scene. In the early 1990s Norwegian Black Metal became a phenomenon of the international underground. The sound is fast and complex, the lyrics inspired by Satanism and pre-Christian mythology. It expresses a worldview that consciously worships evil and the dark forces within the individual and in the Nordic heritage. In Norway, criminal acts perpetrated by the musicians have overshadowed their bands' musical accomplishments. Not surprisingly, as followers and practitioners since 1992 have burned down 40 ancient stave churches. Eight members of the black metal scene have received prison sentences, including two for murder. For Rødland, the fascination lies not in the scandals raging around the musicians, but in the mythological Nordic images that tie into Norwegian Black Metal. "Having done a lot of work focusing on beauty, purity, innocence, LIGHT ­ it was interesting for me to go into the woods with the devil," Rødland says, as an artist who once focused on our images of a pristine Nordic landscape. BLACK consists of portraits of four musicians from the Norwegian black metal scene bearing the stage names of Frost, Fenriz, Abbath and Infernus. Although each of these figures has a powerful personal history, it makes sense to see the young legends as metaphors of other, more fundamental Nordic stories. In embodying an ­ to the public ­ alarming fascination of neo-Nazi mental baggage, Norse Asa faith and black metal, Frost, Fenriz, Abbath and Infernus trigger images in us of what, in Rødland's words, it means to be "evil and Nordic". In that respect, the photographs allude to a Romantic horror vision of a repressed, dark, demonic spirituality, presumably smoldering beneath our well-adjusted Nordic welfare models and "wholesome" brands such as Nokia, Bang & Olufsen, Ikea and Ericsson. BLACK submits the notion that, on the flipside of global Nike culture, a unique Nordic demonology lurks. Both Rødland and Lehtola report on communities that are expressions of a "willed" anti-modernity. They depict individuals reacting to society's rationalization, disciplining and internationalization by reaching partway back to the pre-modern. Their works express a longing to return to the ritual ecstasy and authenticity of the tribe, to arrive at a ³modern tribalism" reflecting a pre-national cohesion within a group and a globalized subculture. APPROACHING FROM ANOTHER ANGLE, the French/Danish artist Colonel (formerly Thierry Geoffroy) has for several years worked with different mappings of the worlds of art and culture. Thus, he has reflected on the perceived existence of a unique, authentic, national identity, and the caricatured foreigner's idea of cultural assimilation. His production shares a kinship with Lehtola's and Rødland's in the sense that he uses his subject area, whether an art institution or the Danish nation, as anthropological site. However, in Colonel the subcultural is not central. Instead, he deals with "the ordinary Dane" and specific cultural areas that he maps out with a focus on intolerance, misguided kindness and hypocrisy. Humor is an important ingredient in fragmentary works that quite matter-of-factly show us the artist as cultural anthropologist ­ or "funny sociologist", as he prefers it. The exhibition features two Colonel videos, I Want to Look Danish, I Want to Look Like You (1999) and Invisible to the Oculist Witnesses (1999), both thematizing integration and differences, as well as the art project L'imperméable (1990-2002). Colonel is an exponent of a distinctly process-oriented and dialogical art that does not kowtow to art-historical requirements for beauty and genre divisions, but instead offers the viewer new forms of communication by moving into the social sphere through long-term activities. His L'imperméable project exemplifies this practice. It consists of a number of coats printed with text and images, coats the artist has worn in various art contexts: walking around Paris, at biennials around the world or in videos such as Invisible to the Oculist Witnesses in this exhibition. L'imperméable is part of Moving Exhibitions, an unfinishable mobile project, critical of institutions, which has both a conceptual aim: creating new strategies for the artwork and the exhibition situation, and an existential aim: Colonel creates his own personal "cabinet of wonders" of internally connected stories about himself, his art and the world around him which, it is likely, no one but the artist himself can connect with respect to all interfaces and historics. Colonel's practice is manifested as a type of transcategorical art that gathers inspiration from ethnography, anthropology, journalism and cultural theory. It points out that, although art may not be the best didactic tool, humorous-artistic language still holds a potential for penetrating into cracks that are beyond the reach of didactic statements. His is an art that, apart from its fragmentary nature, its many piled-on details, its humor and irony, follows a clear, productive strategy, centered as it is on an interest in charting various forms of ideological, cultural and social representation. Amel Ibrahimovic, who like Colonel lives in Denmark, presents a related mapping, both critical of institutions and existential. In Ibrahimovic's drawings, the nation-state mindset and commercial and media-exposed soccer culture meet the art world. The drawings represent well-known artists and gallery owners in different "team lineups" or "idol portraits". Almost like an outside cultural anthropologist observing an isolated ethnic grouping, Ibrahimovic lays bare the largely predictable maps of the contemporary art world. Like Colonel, Ibrahimovic seems less concerned with the formal aspects of the artwork than in how and why art reaches its audience. THE OTHER ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Melek Mazici, Khaled D. Ramadan, Simone Aaberg Kærn and Marco Evaristti, in their various ways operate within the same sets of problems as the above artists. They work with their own culture or with an existential coming-to-terms with themselves as products of mobility, cultural encounters, regional-global consciousness, international subcultures and modernity's still current ambivalence of otherness and self. The exhibition clearly reveals globalization's inherent duality of local and global dynamics. On one hand, the artists are exponents of a relativization of local and national frames of reference, and all express themselves in an international formal language. But that is not to say that their works do not simultaneously recognize and explore local cultural characteristics and, thus, also either mirror or reflect on how consciousness of the global situation increases the attention on local or, at least, existential and regional distinctions. At the same time, the exhibition illustrates the complexity of the global situation, characterized not just by the conflict and co-existence of the global and the local, but by the establishment of various international subcultures which, in highly different ways, can be used to forge new, post-national affiliations. Moreover, the work of these artists recognizes how individuals, in a world where traditional geographic hierarchies and borders are in rapid transformation, time and again are forced to navigate according to their own experiences. In that sense, the works turn in on themselves, contemplating cultural self-understanding ­ not for the purpose of creating new nationalistic-romantic monuments, but as the efforts of melancholy ethnographers alternating cool detachment with societally oriented engagement. MAJOR THANKS GO TO ALL THE ARTISTS: Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Melek Mazici, Simone Aaberg Kærn, Marco Evaristti, Torbjørn Rødland, Khaled D. Ramadan, Jouko Lehtola, Colonel and Amel Ibrahimovic. They engage themselves in our mutual social and existential reality, and ask us to do the same. Stine Høholt, Curator, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Denmark Stine Høholt: Clockwise - New Nordic Contemporary Art: Einleitung [DE] Clockwise - New Nordic Contemporary Art - Introduction [EN] Clockwise - Ny nordisk samtidskunst - Introduktion [DAN] Tomas Ivan Träskman: Exile on Main Street [DE] Exile on Main Street [EN] Exile on Main Street [SVE] Malene Vest Hansen: Nordic Horizontalism: Politisierte Positionen zum Alltag [DE] Nordic Horizontalism: Politicized Positions on Everyday Life [EN] Horisontalt nordisk: politiserede hverdagspositioner [DAN] A CATALOGUE has been published on Clockwise exhibition. To order contact NIFCA assistant@nifca.org

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