Near to the Wild Heart

Artists: Özlem Altın, Kinga Bartis, Mary Beth Edelson, Damla Kilickiran, Jochen Lempert, Antje Majewski / Issa Samb / Olivier Guesselé-Garai, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Max Walter Svanberg, Gudrun Åhlberg

The exhibition brings together works by artists from different generations that trace sensorial, non-verbal, spiritual or otherwise invisible but vividly sensed layers of experience. The “wild heart” referred to in the exhibition title alludes to the essential force of life that animates the world. This vital energy is encountered in the exhibition as desire, magic, sexuality, imagination, ecstacy, nature, or the mystical divine. Central to many of the artworks is the dissolution of boundaries—between the I and the other, the body and the world, or between inner and outer landscapes and experiences—showing how life and death, the human, creativity and nature are all continuous processes of transformation and becoming.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Clarice Lispector’s novel of the same name (Perto do coraçao selvagem, 1943) in which the human mind and body are interwoven with the animalistic force of life and its mysteriously elusive inner being. Lispector had in turn borrowed the phrase “near to the wild heart” from a passage in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), another author famous for portraying inner psychological reality through changeable streams of consciousness and the transgression of boundaries.

At Lunds konsthall the phrase shapeshifts once again, becomes exhibition title and transforms the art gallery into yet another body to temporarily house its wildly beating heart.

Curator: Lisa Rosendahl