MFA Student Interview Series, part VI: Amanda Moberg and Alice Ryne

Amanda Moberg

In Amanda Moberg´s MFA exhibition ”The paths are a pattern only the weaves can see” I was meet by numerous works, all navigating around weaving as a focus point. The works seemed to be engaged with how the notion of weaving comes from language itself and how language can be shifted into new meanings, forms and questions. In French for example, text and textile share the same etymology: to weave comes from the Latin texere which means to braid, but also to weave, write and tell a narrative. In English, to weave comes from wefan which means to weave, invent, combine and arrange.

What has the process been creating this MFA exhibition?
It has been interesting to have so much time to plan and work before an exhibition is completed. Time allows me as an artist to be open to several processes at the same time. The major work is to be responsive and attentive to how these processes or questions can be joined together to form an interesting exhibition.

What has been your inspiration?
From the beginning I wanted to create a garden, so I read a lot of literature about gardens and different myths where the garden has been important as a place or as a metaphor. I was also very inspired by the Danish poet Inger Christensen's poems and above all the work Alphabet, which today is seen as a forerunner in terms of eco-critical poetry. In her work, the world is evoked rhythmically like a spell, and in my exhibition, I wanted to reach the complexity and ambiguity found in Christensen's poems.

Over time, it became clear that the garden as concept would act as an inner image for me, that it did not need to actively take up space or be made clear through the works.

In researching I came across the Sumerian sign for plant, in the postscripts of a book about the goddess Inanna, which looked like a weave with two sets of four lines crossing each other. These lines would be understood as a union between the conscious and the unconscious. I have long worked with weaving from different perspectives, so I started working with the idea of weaving as an abstraction of nature, but also as an ordering principle as part of our human thinking and understanding of the world. In the exhibition, weaving had to take shape in several ways. The various works constituted in themselves a web of signs, time, stories and gestures. It only hit me when everything was finished, and I was guarding the exhibition that it was a garden after all.

You have worked with altering the exhibition room, removing planks in the floor and extracting fiberglass insulation. I experienced this as being both very cheeky and also speaking to a sort of front stage vs backstage choreography, where the exhibition space became a work in itself. What was your thinking around this?
When weaving found its way into the works, as a sign rather than as an object, it felt important to implement that thinking throughout the room. The gallery as a room is special in that it creates a false image of a kind of neutrality, while at the same time you as a visitor come with expectations of being part of something, experiencing something. It's like its own little ecosystem where each exhibition is its own world. In the KHM1 gallery, the image of the gallery as a neutral place becomes almost hyper clear by the fact that the floor has been painting, as a way to create a gray "neutral" floor on top of the original yellow tile floor that testifies to the room's former origins as a factory. Removing floorboards and insulation became both a way to shake up the neutrality of the room and at the same time put the room in touch with another time.

As a visitor, you were put in contact with several layers of realities. Removing the floor and creating a depth also required the visitors to direct their awareness inwards, towards themselves and their own positioning in the room, forcing them into a more active role than as a mere observer. They both became part of the weaving, but they also got to take part as weavers in the exhibition.

Amanda Moberg's exhibition was displayed at Malmö Art Gallery (KHM1) May 31st - June 15th 2024.

Interview by Karin Hald.

Alice Ryne

In Alice Ryne´s MFA exhibition entitled FOREVER ENDEAVOUR, no text was presented together with the show. Two works were placed in one room each, first a fence meet me when I entered the show, which only divided one section of the room, making it into a sculpture more than a barrier. Behind curtains a video work, Tills vidare, was on display, where a young woman had a job to do in a deserted house, which neither she nor I was quite sure what was about. There was a kind of deadpan humor as well as immense trust in the audience in FOREVER ENDEAVOUR.

What has the process been like creating your MFA exhibition?
It’s been very varied and intense! I’ve been completely submerged in it the entire year. I’d say the exhibition as a whole is very much built around the film, Tills vidare, so that’s where it started. I wrote the script and made all the preparations for it during September-November, shot it in December and edited it during the spring while planning for the rest of the exhibition.

It’s dizzying to jump between all the hundreds of very different parts of the process, writing in the studio in Malmö one day and crawling around on the ground in the woods in the middle of nowhere with a dozen snow poles the next.

Sometimes it’s been very lonely, sometimes very social, sometimes painfully slow and sometimes incredibly hectic. So it’s been a ride!

What has been your inspiration?
That’s a tough one. I feel I’m constantly being inspired from all sorts of different directions, in a very messy manner… but maybe that’s also the key to get to the answer to your question. I’m very fascinated by the conventions and clichés of storytelling, not least of cinema, so I think I’m driven by a kind of playful approach to exploring and reusing all kinds of already frequently repeated storytelling elements. So, in other words: learning, picking apart, using and going against the language and expectations of moving images.

A different but equally true answer is that I’m quite often intensely and unexpectedly inspired while just going about my daily life as I’m suddenly struck by a strong feeling that the scenario I’m in or something I’m seeing is very “filmic”. It could be something like my view from the backseat of a moving car while hearing the two persons in the front seat discuss something strangely out of place with each other, or the striking image of a pitch-black rectangle of night outside of an open front door. I suspect these different moments and images have quite a lot in common with each other if analyzed and I think the following question of why these experiences awaken that “feeling of story” or “feeling of cinema” in me fuel my artistic practice in a very direct and curiosity-driven way.

I had a strong feeling that you have a lot of respect for the audience of your work, in the sense that you leave very few clues as to how the work should be perceived as well as the slowness and duration of the video work. What is your thinking and/or feeling regarding this?
I would definitely like to think so myself, so it makes me happy to hear that it seems to come across in my work! I think I do have a lot of respect for, and maybe also trust in, the audience and their ability to enter into the works and to build their own relationship to it. It’s a matter of mutual trust, I think. When working I always picture the audience, their movement though the space, their reactions and questions etc, almost like they’re a character in a scene. I think this imaginary “dialogue” honestly significantly affects all my decisions. While I do like controlling and playing with expectations through surprise, anti-climax and leaving questions unanswered in a sometimes slightly tantalizing or annoying way, I’m still very much hoping to make the audience feel that they have plenty of time and space to build their own idea of the work and that they will never be mocked for not “getting it”. I think the use of humor in my practice is partly the result of that same idea. I want there to be a kind of openness in the works, or at least a slight sense of some shared safety while heading in the direction of heavy, uncomfortable or frightening subjects, together. I think I’m looking to create a feeling, false as it might be, that we’re all in fact approaching the mystery and absurdity at the core of the works together, on equal terms. Me included.

Alice Ryne's exhibition was displayed at Malmö Art Gallery (KHM2) May 31st - June 15th 2024.

Interview by Karin Hald.