Anthony Marcellini
Even a Perfect Crime Leaves a Trace
January 25–February 17, 2013
Göteborgs Konsthall
Götaplatsen
SE-412 56 Göteborg
Sweden
T +46 31 368 34 50
goteborgs.konsthall [at] kultur.goteborg.se
We are standing within a crime scene in a vast exhibition hall, in which hundreds have met their demise. We see stains on the floors, marks on the walls, furniture that has been deliberately moved covering up clues and numerous efficient weapons. The victims and the accused have both consented to the part they play. There is violence and gore yet nothing about this situation is at all sinister or malicious. But because we are detectives, we just can’t help ourselves; we love the savagery.
If artwork from past exhibitions can be understood as bodies that have disappeared—buried alive, abandoned or cremated—the archive represents one of the few traces that shows how this body was once present and active. From correspondence, photos, sketches and shopping lists, we learn something about what happened in these empty rooms. When this archive is manifested as an exhibition, it too becomes a body, a body of evidence, which will soon be buried. Art can be exhumed, re-presented, recreated and perhaps resurrected, but the message changes with each new appearance, and something is always lost.
Even a Perfect Crime Leaves a Trace is an ambitious new commission by artist Anthony Marcellini that draws from Göteborgs Konsthall’s exhibition history. Marcellini also includes new commissioned works by Jörgen Svensson, Elin Wikström, and Johan Zetterquist; performances by Karl Larsson and Matthew Rana; texts by Cecilia Eriksen Wijk, Maja Hammarén and Adam Kleinman; and an exhibition-within-an-exhibition with Bertil Berg, Nils-Olof Bonnier, Monica Englund, Roj Friberg, Carl-Erik Hammarén, Berit Jonsvik, Folke Lind, Barbro Reyman, Jörgen Zetterqvist and others.
Recently, Anthony Marcellini has exhibited at Wilkinson Gallery, London; Galerie Edouard Manet, Centre d’art contemporain de Gennevilliers, Paris; Sequences Art Festival, Reykjavik, amongst others; and upcoming at Witte De With, Rotterdam, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
