Snowball Cultural Productions

Participating Artists:

Anders Smebye (NO) practice through various media and with many hats on. His work involves satire, digressions and misreadings to comment on cultural decay and decadence. Oddities and deities are scrutinized, often ending up as dysfunctional representations with a discharged symbolism. Smebye is educated at Chelsea College of Art, London, UdK in Berlin and at the Royal Academy of Arts in Oslo. He was the founder and director of the projectspace Bastard, Oslo (2005-10), and has worked extensively as curator, writer, lecturer and teacher. Recent solo exhibitions include I´m Not Here at SINNE in Helsinki, Finland, Dor er Dor at Gallery D.O.R. in Brussels, Belgium and Vinlandat Galeria Valenzuela Klenner in Bogotá, Colombia. Smebye has been involved in the collective Parallel Action since 2010, and is currently working on a publication, Mission Creep, for NoInput Books, NY. He lives and works in Berlin and Oslo.

www.anderssmebye.com
www.parallellaksjonen.no

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson are a collaborative artist team. Their art practice is research-based and socially-engaged, exploring issues of history, culture and environment in relation to both humans and non-human animals. Their artworks have been exhibited internationally and they have delivered papers at key conferences in animal studies worldwide.

"We may mow the lawn and weed the borders, but things beyond our control continually arrive and depart, through hedges and fences, across and below the surface of the soil and grass and by air, inhabit or visit the trees and flowers. Some are welcome, some are not, and some are a source of vexation and perplexity. In an unthinking way, what perplexes or bothers us, we would all too often just as soon be without. One thing seems certain: the more we seek to insulate ourselves from what is deemed the natural environment of others, traditionally the more we seem to resent their scratching at our doors and their encroachment in or around our spaces. So while we can acknowledge that other cultures may have a different take on interspecies cohabitation, those more like our own, obsessed with making human environments exclusively human, don't take kindly to being reminded that it isn't just up to us. "

For more information on their work see: www.snaebjornsdottirwilson.com www.radioanimal.org

For the exhibition ”nordic art / Between Miracles”, Denis Romanovski and Elin Wikström have been collecting, art projects, which have not been, can not be made, have failed, were censored, rejected, postponed or consciously left incomplete. About 100 artists from the Nordic countries and Georgia have been invited to contribute their own unrealised or unrealisable art projects. A presentation of the ideaof the museum and the collection will be on display at the Contemporary Art Center Tbilisi. On March 6, 4 pm – 7 pm the artists will be activating the MIUU collection by holding a workshop, where participants will be offered to explore a hypothetical realm of infinite access to all the time, money and resources in the world, the ability to bend time and space, reform social systems and consider anything and everything as material for creative intervention. Using the projects submitted by the invited artists another aim of the workshop is to discuss and evaluate different understandings of the possible and impossible.

Denis Romanovski is an artist and organizer, he graduated both Belarus State Academy of Arts in Minsk in 2001 and Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2006. Since 1999 he focuses mostly on performance art, presenting his works in various countries world wide. As an organizer he has been running performance festival Navinki in Minsk (1999-2008) and during recent years - Performance Art Links festival in Stockholm. His artist practice often extends to and merges with research, experimental forms and technologies. Working with major themes like Auditory Navigation, Phantom Expression, Kara(oke)Tribune, Futureview he produced series of works in several formats and methods. www.romanovski.se

Elin Wikström studied Fine Art at Valand Academy 1987 – 1992 in Göteborg, Sweden. Her work deals with being subjected to a constructed situation, which leads to reflection on social issues. Concepts like “dialogue” and “intervention” are key to understanding Wikström’s practice, which include her own participation, along with the necessary collaboration and exchange with audiences and fellow participants. To rely on the participation of other people and making use of their skills have become increasingly important to her. A great deal of Wikström’s work occurs outside the walls of the traditional art space. In 2013 she is working on projects for the exhibitions Interventions artistiques & organisations, Contexts, Paris, France, Even A Perfect Crime Leaves a Trace, Göteborgs Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden and Emscherkunst, Essen, Germany

http://impossible.romanovski.se/

Eva Koch´s installation APPROACH borrows its text from Dante's "Divine Comedy", written in Italy almost 700 years ago. Dante's poem is concerned with man's search for meaning and not least for the inexplicable or intangible. On entering the installation APPROACH you hear voices reciting the first 13 verses of "Paradiso", and you meet the visual side, in which a number of persons recite the same verses, but in sign language. The 13 verses contain Dante's deeply felt prayer to Apollo to give the poet the strength to hold onto just a little part of what he has seen on his journey. The sound track and the visuals thus tell the same story, but in different languages. Caught between these two languages, the visitor to the installation is sharply confronted with the fundamental situation of our relation to the surrounding world, the constant necessity of interpretation. The ideal of unambiguous communication does not exist. We are always in a field of interpretation, and even though we speak the same language, it is not given that we understand the same thing.

www.evakoch.net

Josefina Posch´s sculpture [crowdsourced] ghosts of a former self (2013) Silicone, Stop-motion camera The two sculptures are silicone casts made from Posch's most recent sculptures part of (crowdsourced) NOIR / Love Beyond Recognition in which the artist cast body-parts from a multitude of Gothenburg based persons of varying age and background that were assembled into one female and one male figure - the average Gothenburg inhabitant. The work is a continuation of Posch's interest in the body in contemporary art and how it might be possible to revisit the thoughts of it as 'cosmografia del minor mondo' where if not the workings of the human body but our relation to it, to be an analogy for the workings of maybe not the universe but our present society. In this new piece the time-lapse camera stands-in for the live web video stream the artist usually utilizes part of her sculptural work - the documentation to be exhibited at a later time.

Josefina Posch returned to her birth city Gothenburg in 2007 where she is now based. She has shown her projects internationally from a recent solo show at Gallery 54 in Gothenburg, Sweden to China, the U.K and the U.S via Italy where she created an 8m inflated rubber iceberg for the 'Migration Addicts' public interventions at the 52nd Venice Biennale. She has been an artist-in-residences at Sculpturespace NY, Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, IT and Duolun MoMA, Shanghai and her work?has been featured in magazines, on TV and on the Radio.

www.josefinaposch.com

Shut up Child, This Ain't Bingo, is a video installation by Lars Lauman that tells the true story of the relationship between Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig and her collaborative partner Carlton Turner, a Texan death row inmate. Combining his own photographic and video documentation with found material, Laumann focuses on the 3-month period from the end of the couple's artistic work together until Turner's execution and how during this time their relationship shifted from professional to romantic. Lars Laumann draw inspiration from the outskirts of popular culture, mixing different media and techniques to create works explores ideas of fandom, obsession, conspiracy and love, both romantic and divine. By sampling and re-editing he tells stories that take form as installations and videos unveiling idiosyncratical worlds that are bout unsettling and humours revelations of our modern mythologies.

Laumans work has previously been exhibitions at White Columns, Marian Goodman Gallery, New Museum and the MoMA, (New York), at the Kunsthalle Winterthur and Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland), and at the 5th Berlin Biennial and , Haus der Kulturen der Welt, (Germany). VI VII, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, and National Museum for Contemporary art (Norway). Maureen Paley, ICA, Liverpool Biennial, Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Tate Modern (UK)

www.maureenpaley.com/artists/lars-laumann

OK LOL New game plan by Leslie Johnson begins with the stick fig. drawings that illustrate methods or situations explained in textbooks. In the game room installation we can ponder what is the game and who are the players. The work explores the situation also through the use different types of wood and veneer. Linguistic jokes, such as the pressence of wood with ”knots” are also part of the exploration of ambiguous meanings. Through the process of re-imagining the overlooked and ephemeral, Johnson reworks small objects, ephemera, found images, and fragments of text from daily life into significance, inviting reconsideration of their symbolic status and value.

Leslie Johnson´s work has been exhibited in Moscow, New York, and widely in Scandinavia, where she has worked at the Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, Sweden as an educator, researcher, and Director. Solo exhibitions at 1 Shanthi Road, Bangalore, India (2012); Galleri 54, Gothenburg, Sweden (2005); Borås Konstmuseum, Sweden (2004); and Galleri Paletten, Gothenburg, Sweden (2001). Exhibited work in public places throughout Sweden such as Gothenburg Azalea Park (2011), medical centers in Hunnebostrand (2011) and Strömstad (2012), libraries in Kungshamn (2000) and the Gothenburg-Landvetter Airport, among others. Johnson has produced self-published artist books and publications since 1984, and has been published in Swedish art journals Ord & Bild, Paletten, and Art Monitor, among others. She received awards from the Swedish State Arts Council, Society Gnistan, and Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina in Buenos Aires (RIAA) in 2010, and her work is represented in private and public collections, including the Swedish State Collection, West Sweden Region, Borås, Västerås, and Gothenburg Art museums.

www.lesliejohnson.info

Haïti Chérie was created in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010 in which the artist Sasha Huber made an intervention on the frozen, snow-covered Baltic Sea. A couple of weeks after the quake, dressed in a custommade jumpsuit in the colors of the Haitian flag, I made snow angels as a symbol of my mourning, the lost lives, my solidarity and hope. This represents my feeling of helplessness and the pain that I can still feel. The intervention is installed as a video in the larger room at Kluuvi Gallery. The name of the video and exhibition, Haïti Chérie (My Dear Haiti), was inspired by the traditional creole song written and composed by Dr. Othello Bayard de Cayes, which expresses Haitian people’s pride in their country and culture. The Haitian community regards it as their second national anthem. I heard this song as a child, while visiting my family in Haiti.

Huber has edited the book Rentyhorn (2010), and was co-editor of (T)races of Louis Agassiz: Photography, Body and Science, Yesterday and Today (2010) on the occasion of the 29th Biennale of São Paulo (Brazil). She has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014, and has been invited to artist residencies in Brazil, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, New Zealand and Australia. Huber holds an MA from the University of Art and Design Helsinki, and is currently undertaking doctoral research on racism through the lens of art at the Department of Art at Aalto University, Helsinki (Finland).

www.sashahuber.com