Dora Budor, Fidelity, Beau Travail, Stockholm
Perched in a tiny eighteenth-century cottage in the middle of Stockholm, Beau Travail feels surreal, like a dreamlike antithesis to the city’s over-scripted commercial art world. The program is spectacular too: hyper-relevant international indie artists and Scandinavian scenesters in vital DIY-shows that spark creative joy. This year’s favourite was Dora Budor’s video work shown on monitors built from champagne crates with lens-like screens pushing the image to the verge of 3D. Inside the crates, a bank collapse unfolded in a black and white nostalgic shimmer, courtesy of Marcel L’Herbier’s 1928 film adaptation of Émile Zola’s L’Argent (1891). Another kick-ass show was coyote’s Millennium, featuring anachronistic costumes, mirrors, and spotlights that made both reality and time feel like constructions.
Carola Grahn, Drick Drick, Liljevalchs+, Stockholm
The year’s Narnia moment unfurled behind a small pinewood door in Carola Grahn’s exhibition at Liljevalchs+. It produced a perfect portal: an opening led into an oversized room that I wasn’t permitted to enter. Instead, I remained on a porch overlooking another world – dreams, after all, can’t be touched. The room was lit by two warmly glowing outdoor fixtures and a set of spotlights illuminating an enchanting snowfall on the far side. Snowflakes drifted slowly toward the ground, casting shadows across the space in a sublimely nature-romantic scene. And it smelled of pine – overwhelmingly and almost comically intrusively so – like a marker of a nature both staged and exaggerated.
SHAME, Art Film Festival, Stockholm
Stockholm’s first edition of Art Film Festival – SHAME, directed by Nathalie Djurberg, Hans Berg, and Silvana Lagos, carried all the hallmarks of a Berlin club: dark rooms in an abandoned office building, black drapes, and secret back staircases. I had a cigarette in the window and indulged in the theme – shame – which pulsed through the entire presentation. It was wonderful to see so much video art at once, especially from legends like Cory Arcangel, Alex Da Corte, Paul McCarthy, and Pipilotti Rist. I got stuck in front of Ryan Trecartin’s hysterical fake reality show, which I could have easily watched until I was fully lobotomised. SHAME moved effortlessly between disgust, humour, and pure euphoria.
– Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl is an art critic and regular contributor to Kunstkritikk. She is also the founding editor of the cultural magazine Nuda.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here.
