Jonas Dahlberg:
An Imagined City
October 18–December 31, 2012
MAP, Mobile Art Production in Stockholm
Nybrogatan 57, Stockholm
Hours: The installation changes form during day and night.
An Imagined City is activated with light and sound during parts of the evening.
Access: Metro red line: Station Östermalmstorg
Jonas Dahlberg is one of Sweden’s most prominent artists, working at the intersection of art, architecture and film. This October, Dahlberg will present An Imagined City, a site-specific work on and around the old post office, Postenhuset, at Nybrogatan 57 in Stockholm. The piece is an architectural sound and light installation and is produced by MAP, Mobile Art Production in collaboration with Oscar Properties.
During the restoration of the old post office on Nybrogatan 57, Jonas Dahlberg has transformed the building into an austere, black façade to use as his backdrop. In daylight, the temporarily blackened building becomes the archetypal image of contemporary architecture, only to be transformed into a seemingly black hole at night.
When darkness falls, four windows light up and shine their spotlights down onto the street. The beams are filled with voices that take the viewer on a journey through cities, places and buildings, in stories that are based on an archive of memories of cinematic rooms and spaces. The austere façade, or the black hole, becomes a screen onto which the audience can project their own memories, thoughts and ideas regarding architecture and what a city could be.
Since the very beginning of his career, Jonas Dahlberg has worked with staged situations revolving around the viewer’s movements through spaces in different fictitious worlds. In An Imagined City, he deepens his interest in the mirroring of psychological architecture. To date, Dahlberg’s preferred medium has been film, but in An Imagined City, he leaves the medium behind and steps straight onto the street, where the viewer becomes the focus of events.
An Imagined City is a temporary staging of public space, a kind of theatre where everything is possible. What kind of city do we want? Which architecture is imaginable in the first place, and what happens when one temporarily dramatises a quotidian milieu?
About Jonas Dahlberg
Dahlberg (b. 1970) has studied both art (Malmö Art Academy) and architecture (Lund University). His work comprises video, public art, sculpture, photography and book projects of varying kinds. In the summer of 2012, he created the stage design for an opera at the Grand Théâtre in Geneva. Dahlberg has participated in exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Kunsthalle Wien, the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial and at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, to name but a few. Whether Dahlberg is working in installation, film or any other medium, spatiality is of central importance. Architecture becomes a political place that allows us to understand ourselves, and how body and soul integrate with the outside world.
MAP has produced Jonas Dahlberg’s piece An Imagined City in collaboration with Oscar Properties, the owners of the building on Nybrogatan 57. This is MAP’s final production before the organisation closes down at the end of the year 2012.
