Room 1

Teresa Wennberg/Pierre Lobstein, Torsten Andersson, Cecilia Edefalk and others

Narrator: The exhibition opens with the work “Nuit Blanche” from 1983, a powerful video installation with 25 monitors, or TV screens, by Teresa Wennberg and Pierre Lobstein.
 
The French phrase “Nuit Blanche” literally means “white nights”. But it is also a metaphorical expression for staying up all night, or sleepless nights. It is also an annual art festival in Paris and other cities in October, featuring events where light plays an important part. The title of our exhibition, “Sleepless Nights” was inspired by the work by Wennberg and Lobstein.
 
Teresa Wennberg was one of many women artists who experimented with video and computer art in the 1980s. These media were still in their early days. She studied painting, but moved to Paris in the late 1970s, where there was more interest and greater opportunities to explore video.
In Nuit Blanche, two people meet for the first time. Words (in French) alternate on the screens: put, throw, search, follow, steal, threaten, flash… Eyes that dare not meet look this way and that. Hopes and fears are emphasised by the sound of footsteps and screams. The eternity symbol, a horizontal figure of eight, suggests that the drama is as primordial as life itself, despite its technological framing.
Four paintings by the artist Torsten Andersson are also shown in this room. Andersson belonged to a slightly older generation, which became widely popular in the 1980s, partly through an exhibition at Moderna Museet in 1986. His paintings are neither abstract nor figurative, but both. This series is a study of the maple, the spring and the birch.
Lastly, we have one of the period’s most famous works, “Another Movement”, from 1990. It was Cecilia Edefalk’s breakthrough as an artist. The series consists of seven different-sized paintings, each one based on the original picture from 1988, a photo of a man putting lotion on a woman’s back. It was from an ad in the fashion magazine Clic.
 
Edefalk altered the motif to emphasise what she saw as its specific tension. The lotion bottle is no longer present. The stiff, square figures stand out clearly against the uniform, electric blue background.