Carl Michael von Hausswolff
I am the Others
7 September–3 November 2013
Lunds konsthall
Mårtenstorget 3
SE-22351 Lund, Sweden
T +4646355295
lundskonsthall [at] lund.se
Lunds konsthall presents one of Sweden’s most outstanding artists, born in Linköping in 1956 and based in Stockholm and Palma de Mallorca. He is also active as a composer, filmmaker and curator. All of this is evident in the exhibition, titled I Am the Others. It is, at the same time, a solo exhibition by the artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff and a group exhibition organised by the curator Carl Michael von Hausswolff.
The exhibition contains work by a number of persons, most of whom are well known, but not as artists. They have caught von Hausswolff’s attention because of their exceptional actions and stances, which for different reasons could be characterised as art. Seen together, their lives and characters also form a self-portrait of von Hausswolff, in the sense that all of them have done something that he can identify or sympathise with.
Those portrayed in the exhibition are Corazón Amurao (The Philippines), Laura Lee Burroughs (US), Clint Eastwood (US), Olga Eriksson (Sweden), James B Irwin (US), Friedrich Jürgenson (Russia/Estonia/Sweden), Salvatore Lucania (Italy/US), Selmer Nilsen (Norway), Hiroo Onoda (Japan/Brazil) and Wu Ping (China), as well as the members of ‘The Military Gang’ (Sweden) and the ‘meta-scientists’ behind the Spiricom instrument (US).
I Am the Others offers an indirect retrospective view of von Hausswolff’s many-faceted activities from the late 1970s until today, for which his interest in society and the human condition was always the sounding board. But the exhibition doesn’t try to capture his entire register as a sound and light artist clearly rooted in performance art. In installations, performances and concerts von Hausswolff has articulated space and time, memories of the past and inexplicable messages from ‘the other side,’ often using various kinds of recording and measuring equipment: tape recorders, cameras, radar, sonars… Music has always been a second home to him. He helped found and run two record companies. Radium 226.05 was created in 1986; Anckarström four years later.
Just as characteristic of von Hausswolff’s practice are his many collaborative projects. Two of these are featured at Lunds konsthall. Under the name PHAUSS he and Erik Pauser carried out a range of projects while they were both living in Gothenburg in the 1980s. Their travelogues Alger–Lagos 1983 and Zürich–Zürich 1986 are included in the exhibition, along with Al Qasr, Baharyia Oasis, Egypt 2005, one of the films from von Hausswolff’s ongoing collaboration with Thomas Nordanstad.
Among von Hausswolff’s other collaboration partners are the artists Leif Elggren, Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena and Jan Håfström, the EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) researcher Michael Esposito, the ex-model and poet Leslie Winer and the musicians John Duncan, Jean-Louis Huhta, Graham Lewis (Wire) and Martin Rössel.
He has participated in many international group exhibitions, such as Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam (1996), documenta X in Kassel, the biennials in Istanbul (1997), Johannesburg (1997), Santa Fe (1999) and Liverpool (2004) and the Venice Biennial (2001, 2003, 2005). He has also had numerous solo exhibitions, for instance at Färgfabriken in Stockholm (2000), ICC in Tokyo (2000), CCA in Kitakyushu (2001) and Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2004).
In 2003 von Hausswolff curated the Gothenburg Biennial, under the title Against All Evens. In recent years he has organised sound art events such as freq_out, with manifestations in institutions such as Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Henie-Onstad Center in Oslo, Sonambiente in Berlin and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Our warm thanks go first of all to Carl Michael von Hausswolff for the enjoyable collaboration and the impressive results. We also thank the lenders—Per Forsberg, Staffan Lamm, Marianne Lindberg von Baumgarten and the gallerist Niklas Belenius—for their kind assistance. Special thanks go to Thomas Nordanstad and Erik Pauser for their participation and help.
Finally we also wish to thank Anna von Hausswolff, who gives a concert in Lund Cathedral in connection with the exhibition opening.
