Johan Grimonprez and Truls Melin

JOHAN GRIMONPREZ
MARCH 28 – JUNE 7
Curator: Tessa Praun

TRULS MELIN
OUTDOOR PROJECT: MENTAL TOGETHERNESS (2009)
Installed by Saturday, March 28.
Curator: Tessa Praun

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
Frihamnen, SE -115 56 Stockholm
Phone: +46 8 545 680 40
art [​at​] magasin3.com

www.magasin3.com

Johan Grimonprez’s latest work Double Take (2009) is part of the Magasin 3 collection and is here presented for the first time at an institution in Europe. The film is a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock and his popular role as presenter in his own TV series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1955-65). Material by and about Hitchcock is interwoven with TV footage of the Cold War – a period where prosperity and the American idyll were disrupted by political turbulence. Fact and fiction merge in this experimental film investigating how our perception of reality is influenced by mass media, advertising and Hollywood. The narrative is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ novella August 25, 1983 where the author meets an older version of himself. For Double Take the British writer Tom McCarthy has changed the plot to make Hitchcock meet himself. To a certain extent the work is an adaptation and continuation of Grimonprez’s film Looking for Alfred (2005).

The exhibition also features the work Manipulators – Maybe the sky is really green, and we’re just colorblind/YouTube-o-theque from 2006 which is a collection of video clips taken from the Internet’s endless flow of information such as on YouTube and blogs. Again we find a mix of reality and fiction and an imminent risk of manipulation.

The artist had his great breakthrough at the end of the 1990′s with the work Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) – a film collage of airplane hijackings as shown in different media such as TV news, propaganda films and cartoons. Johan Gimonperez was born in 1962 in Belgium; he lives and works in Brussels and New York.

Johan Grimonprez will be in Stockholm later this spring when he will give a talk at Magasin 3.

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Truls Melin has specially created one of his evocative sculptures to stand in front of the Magasin 3 building. Measuring over 5 meters high, this large-scale piece is his first outdoor sculpture in Stockholm. The intricate system of pipes is painted a shade of green that psychologists deem to be calming and which the viewer may recognize from previous works by Melin.

Tessa Praun, the curator of the project, describes the piece as follows: “Two figures are incorporated into this closed circuit – they seem to have abandoned their physical form in order to fuse with the fixed, static form of the pipes. They represent an alienation of sorts but keep each other company in an imagined and desired companionship.”

Truls Melin has retained his child-like imagination, which along with an interest in model building is the source of many of his motifs. His sculptures tend to be monochromatic with very few details and are evocative of memories, dreams or the subconscious. This new work will come to mark Magasin 3′s location within the Freeport area in the coming years.

Born in Malmö in 1958, Truls Melin is one of Sweden’s and indeed Scandinavia’s most esteemed artists. Amongst others he has exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum and at the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Truls Melin has been living and working in Copenhagen since the mid 1980′s.