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Assem Hendawi (EG), Oona Libens (BE/SE), Lisa Tan (US/SE), Joline Uvman (SE)

When the Sun Goes Down
2/2-3/3 2024

Curator: Sara Rossling (SE)

Opening: Friday 2 February 17.00-21.00

A longer text by the curator can be found through this link:

Performance by Oona Libens: Saturday 3/2, 15:00
For info on the performance, see the bottom of the page



When the Sun Goes Down is a group show that, through light-sensitive processes, image creation, and writing, explores the self in relation to mathematical and structural perspectives and thresholds the natural environment evokes. In the exhibition, video works, shadow play, installation, and photography elicit linguistic and visual alterations, imitations of the physical world, and meditations on the correlation between the human interior and the cycles of the landscape.

The rotation of the Earth creates a circadian rhythm that affects almost all organisms. As the sunlight shifts throughout the day, the human internal clock changes, as does our perception of the surrounding world. At twilight, the daylight recedes, and our bodies become less active, but the sun never sets in the digital world.

When the Sun Goes Down shows a selection of artworks by Assem Hendawi, Oona Libens, Lisa Tan, and Joline Uvman, where light and shadow act as resources and as silent co-narrators. The exhibition title is an analogy for Lisa Tans title Sunsets —a recurring choreography caused by the spinning earth creating the illusion of sunset, to which humans feel a peculiar pull. At the same time, the exhibition title points to the spatiotemporal moment when the sunlight is about to disappear and be replaced by our concerns about its absence.


Assem Hendawi is an artist and researcher based in Alexandria who works with videos, computer-based media, and text whose works act as spaces for worldmaking. His work questions historical and sociopolitical events around planetary computation, critical posthumanities, and the way in which technology constructs subjectivity. Through heuristics that extend from the abstract and philosophical to the imaginary and the absurd, Hendawi explores the manipulations that accompany late capitalism’s technologies as the site of rewriting narratives, identities, and traditions.

Oona Libens is an artist and musician living in Malmö whose work revolves around the history of the moving image. In her performances — a hybrid between abstract object theatreand educational documentary — she develops a distinctly crafted universe consisting of fragile mechanisms and analog techniques. In her work, she merges science and poetry, often taking shadow theatre as a starting point. She also operates and manipulates other historical and more recent projection techniques in order to expose its mechanisms. In this way, she creates a dialogue between old and modern media phenomena, from the magic lantern as an educational tool to today’s touch screens and virtual reality.

Lisa Tan is an artist living in Stockholm where she is Professor of Art at Konstfack. Her work traces the contours of life as it is shaped by desire and determined by the contingent encounters that form it. To do this, she draws from an array of disparate associations: properties of certain natural phenomena, biographical details of one or two literary figures, violent encounters that recall others, and many more mobilizing triggers. Her process is initiated by an intuitive sense for how a situation or question that is personal in nature, when imbued with feeling, develops into a conversation on subjectivity and its relation to language, its impact on society, and its resonance in a world of others. Her work takes the form of installation, photography, video, and writing, among other gestures.

Joline Uvman is an artist based in Berlin and Motala who works with installation, sculpture, text, and photographic processes. In her work, she seeks to grasp the senses of time and affect by merging various types of expressions and languages: the material, the written, the pictorial, and the mathematical. Her most recent project Auto Bios Grapho, presented at StudyForArtPlatform 2023-2024, is an exhibition in three parts departing from the novel Autobiography of Red by poet Anne Carson. The work Auto Bios Grapho seeks to find an emotional meeting point of the personal and the structural and can be seen both as a dissection of the form of the autobiography and a meditation on lineage.

Sara Rossling is an independent curator and writer living in Malmö. She is interested in site and context-related work and values collaborative processes. She has curated and co-curated contemporary art exhibitions, projects, and public art in cultural and historic sites, outdoors environments, museums and art spaces in Sweden and internationally. Her recent exhibitions are Persistence Through Joy (with Power Ekroth), Something Else Cairo Off Biennale, 2023; Om Sorg Trollkonster och Humor, Växjö konsthall, 2023; Sticklingar, Uppsala konstmuseum, 2022; ISLET FICTIONS Or the Presence of the Gap (with MeryemSaadi), Art Lab Gnesta, 2022, and Rumours an audio exhibition at Index - The SwedishContemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, 2022. She sits on the board of the Nordic ArtAssociation in Sweden, and between 2020-2022 she was the chairman.


Lisa Tans film Sunset is distributed by FilmForm

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗲𝗹𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲.

Galleri CC is supported by Malmö stad and Kulturrådet

Performance:

 

Oona Libens
Nephology - A Chorus of Clouds (2023)

Performance Saturday 3 February
3:00-3.20 pm, limited number of seats (ca 20)
The gallery closes at 4pm


A warm welcome to Oona Libens’ performance Nephology - A Chorus of Clouds (2023), which is presented in the group exhibition When the Sun Goes Down at Galleri CC.

Libens’ performance takes place in a new time-based installation that shows a typology of clouds and weather-related phenomena through projection, movement, and sound in a spatial atmosphere that alternately casts shadows and plays of light.

"Nephology" stems from the Greek word "nephos" which is the study of clouds and cloud formation. In her performance, the artist activates a scheme of meteorological processes and presents a web of myths, facts, and stories about clouds to a soundscape of rain and thunder between the poetic and the authoritarian. With inspiration from educational documentaries and shadow theater as a starting point, underlying mechanisms of old and new project techniques and the mediating role of knowledge become exposed.