Entangled Tales
15.10.2020-15.09.2021
Entangled Tales was a public video art program in Stockholm subway at Skanstull station, part of Region Stockholm's project Konstväxlingar. The program, in four chapters, showed works by the six international artists/artist duos Roy Samaha, Will Benedict, Anca Benera & Arnold Estéfan, and Anton Vidokle & Pelin Tan. Curated by Sara Rossling.
In common to the various video works is that they explore entanglements in our world, various nexus and how these are organised, and human's role in it. By sensing and perceiving, seeing connections, imagining and speculating, the artists investigate how human time on earth is entangled with climate change and how time cycles recur and affect nature phenomena, ideas, and politics. The videos remind us that perceptions of our world are constantly changing depending on who we are and where we.
The program ran between October 2020 to September 2021 and comprised:
Sun Rave (2018), 11:00 min
Roy Samaha is a video artist and photographer with a background in the news and television industry. In his artistry, he explores non-linear relationships between images, memory, and history through embodied experience. In Sun Rave, he examines childhood anecdotes heard in an apartment until the revolutionary year of 1989 when a great solar storm broke out. The video weaves together historical layers from Romania and Lebanon, natural events, and ancient encryption of languages; how the sun's cycles unpredictably emit energy flares that disrupt the earth's magnetic field and affect radio transmissions, communications, and human reason on a large scale.
All Bleeding Stops Eventually (2019), 4:11 min
Will Benedict works in different mediums such as video, painting, and collage. His videos borrow expressions from film, marketing, and social media platforms to explore the relationship between art, commercial production, and advertising. All Bleeding Stops Eventually is a series of six short videos created in collaboration with author Chuz Martínez. In the videos, endangered animals take the tone of a message to us humans: change your habits or die. The work was made in response to a panel discussion at the UN on climate change in the oceans and cryosphere since 1970. The work reminds us that we all live on the same planet and when species disappear, so will we.
Citrus Tristeza (2018), 15:14 min
Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán have been working as an artist duo since 2011, and their practice involves video, installation, and performance. They apply a research-based method to reveal invisible patterns that lie behind certain historical, social, or geopolitical narratives. The term "citrus tristeza" refers to a species of the Closterovirus that attacks and destroys millions of citrus trees worldwide. The emergence of the virus, which since the 1930s has created great economic damage for, among others, a farmer in South America, coincides tragically with the rise of fascism in Europe. In the video, that takes place in Sicily, the history of Italy is woven together with that of Romania. The viewer gets to follow people who write messages with lemons on the city's walls, but as the lemon juice evaporates, the words fade away.
2084: A Science Fiction Show, episode 3: The Noosphere (2013), 22:00 min
Anton Vidokle is a video and conceptual artist, and Pelin Tan is a sociologist and interdisciplinary researcher. They have collaborated since 2010, and together they have made the film series 2084: A Science Fiction Show, which explores the history of the future. “The year is 2084. Money has been abolished and people exchange information products based on value. Art has colonized life and every aspect of daily existence has become aesthetic.” In the third episode, The Noosphere, the duo examines philosophical ideas from a cyclical and cosmological perspective, the latter influencing the Russian Revolution, among others. The film's script is a collage of texts by researchers about the philosophical concept of the noosphere, "sphere of reason" and about Russian space research in the early 20th century.