“I want to belong to the living” is an exhibition by Isfrid Angard Siljehaug, Anna Hillbom and Ann-Catrin Olsson. The artists wish to make possible a tactile re-reading of the past, where the agency of each artist's work at times is blurred, at times visible. A play with the relation of object, artist and agency in the gallery space, as well as in a broader sense of history writing.

Elements from art history, architecture, mythology and the body are used to enable a personal understanding of time, a rupture in chronology. By that bring out a possible mystic, a giggle, something skin-warm.

The title indicates a wish to bring to life fragments adapted from the past. Canalized and altered, they become animated shreds of something vaguely familiar. “I want to belong to the living” refers to the body's yearning for eternality. A fantasy about sculptures who long to be touched. Like John Berger is looking for the living in Greek sculptures.

”All the sculptures stolen from Greece who are now in foreign museums, are strangely un-sensual and that's one of the reasons they belong here (in Greece). The sensual in art is in a way a glorification of participation, a cohesion between body and nature. Here does no such cohesion exist. The famous ideals that the classic sculptors searched for was actually a comfort for the loneliness of the body. All these sculptures were, it seems to me now, mediators of a well controlled longing without end.”

- John Berger

This exhibition is generously supported by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Iapsis/Swedish Arts Council.


Photo documentation by Ilya Rabinovich