JASON PLATFORM: Public exhibition in the Academy of Fine Arts' sculpture garden

This year’s program at Jason Platform investigates the concept of energy – how it is created, released, transformed and made anew. We aim to portray energy as something situated in-between an individual capability, an industrial potential and a bodily sensation. Our program follows the stages of ’the energy curve of combustion’ and consequently the four exhibitions will be curated accordingly; the first exhibition deals with Potential, the second deals with the Climax, the third with Loss and the fourth and final with Transformation. Together they break with any notion of climatic endings and combustive inevitability and try to broaden the view.

POTENTIAL 

Our first exhibition vibrates and yearns for something yet to come. A potential power in an inert substance. Any workforce idly waiting for their next task. All the apparatuses on stand-by binding their time around us. We’ve invited three artists to create works based on this theme: Ellen Rosdala approaches the subjects through the formalized object, designed to serve a function. Oscar Ramos entices our imagination through suggestive imagery. Netti Nüganen’s body poses questions of indecisiveness. To accompany the exhibition we present a commissioned text written by Fie Martens Ljungmann, a student from Forfatterskolen. Translated to english by Adrian Delafontaine. 
 

INTRODUCTION TO THE EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Oscar Ramos

Oscar Ramos Olivares is a Mexican born artist and curator based in Gothenburg. He works with a wide range and mix of media to reflect on the visual imagery produced on the fringes of popular culture and digital media aesthetics. He is co-founder of the Gothenburg  contemporary art Platforms SVILOVA & NSFW and has curated exhibitions with Metahaven, Hito Steyerl, Sandra Mujinga and William Basisnki among others.

Showing “Billy I , II”

Size: 50 x 70 cm (each one)

Digital print on paper, 125 grams, 250 stacked sheets *take-away prints

Objects are not only material and tangible items, they also carry and generate ideas. One could even say that once produced, objects have a life of their own such as words or images do. I believe objects pursue their own trajectories creating their own connections and meanings.

The work “Billy I , II” is not only an exploration of the concepts of animism (the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence) but also about the intangible link between spirituality and consumerism.

Selected exhibitions include Tre utställningar som #4, @ 3:e Våningen; Business As Usual, Pyramide Art Center & Turf Projects, London; The Shape Of Happiness To Come, Tidaholms Konsthall; V.8.07, Norberg Festival, Norberg; Digital Art weeks, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and The Residents re-reviewed, MOMA (The Museum Of Modern Art New York), New York, USA.

Netti Nüganen

Netti is a performance artist and musician working between Tallinn and Amsterdam. She has been busy with theatre, music, circus and sports and has graduated from SNDO in Amsterdam. Her influences from such a variety of subjects make her treat everything that is known with careful deconstruction and everything unknown with vigilant attention. Through her stage and video works she creates characters like weightlifter, teenage vlogger, detective, historian, cowboy and more. Building narratives while deconstructing them is one of her methods of creating fantasies to understand the gaps between recognisable signs, references and language.

Performing “temporary business”

Rumours go that over centuries and milleniums the layers underneath the ground have preserved friction energy from sociologic changes and collective reconfigurations. The crust of the earth has stored geological activities, memories and marches, generating magnetic heat and making it possible in ideal circumstances to defeat the decomposition of flesh.

How long has she been there, defying decomposition, nobody knows. But the layers are getting thicker as she crawls and crawls and crawls and crawls. Up, where the sunlight pierces through the open cracks and her lengthy fingernails are scratching, clawing through the soil. She is boiling, roasting, red-hot fuming. The cold, fresh air too unbearable to be inhaled, the light too bright and vivid to be absorbed – so she vents. Completely chaotic, headless, spineless. She needs a form – any distinct style – to clasp onto. So that she could tend to some temporary business – and then be gone again forever.
 

Ellen Rosdala

Ellen, based in south-eastern Sweden, is mainly working with sculpture and installations and she often extracts from forms, moods and materials that point to emotional and physical work. Her interest in how political and personal events affect individuals and places often ends up in parallel and overlapping narratives based in her own experiences of sites and memories. 

Showing “and the sun still sets every night II, 2020”

and the sun still sets every night II is part of a long-term project of using sites to explore different kinds of destructiveness, through its negative and positive aspects. The shape is partly inspired by playgrounds in Narva (a city in north-eastern Estonia bordering Russia) and it plays with the idea of “form follows function” through its possibilities of re-shaping depending on the current surroundings or narrative needs.