The living and breathing archive of industrial history, 2021

Watercolour/ Wash drawing on paper.

Excerpts from the text "It's a Mind Field":

//...The highly visible pollution of land and water was something I as a child read through my favorite 80's comics, in which the Spiderman, Swamp thing and the Hulk was transformed/merged through contamination of radioactivity and toxins. But, much to my disappointment, in real life the inhabitants of course did not get enhanced in any way. The chlorine bleaching of pulp exposed the workers to a veritable chemical weapon infecting their lungs, heavy metals as cadmium increased the rate of cancer in the population and the local fish dishes delivered hight doses of toxins due to the food chain in the Baltic sea, which led to a kind of living and breathing bodily archive of industrial history...//

It's a Mind Field, 2021

Excerpts from text written in an abandoned bunker.

//...The military training field, or firring range, is a place that partly lost its function and therefore opened up a space for actions that could exist in flux, as a state of discourse. Or like in a think tank: thoughts freed from their exploitation reflexes, like colorful tropical fishes carrying their own goal. Under the title "It's a Mind Field", I will make a literary turn on the training field to become an open discourse/field and redirecting the war rethoric to a defense system with wildlife as its protected object. Like an administrative code-switch- bomb-to-birds.//

Diamonds and dirt on the windshield of the skidder, 2021

Wash drawings.

Webbed, 2021

Yellow clay sculpture. 

En kvadrat av nattmörker dröjer sig kvar i vattenspegeln, 2021

Akvarell på papper, 2021.

Exo migratory movements, 2020

Ylva Westerlund

Exo migratory movements

21 November- 13 December

TITANIC @ REIMERSHOLME HOTEL

TITANIC

Adress: Reimersholmsgatan 5, 117 40 Stockholm, Sweden

Curator: Tova Mozard

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Skogvaktarkärret, a wetland north of Stockholm – February 2020 – there is snow hanging in the air and the sounds of the Eurasian coot can be heard from the reed.

Westerlund’s aquarelle paintings serve as memorandums from a series of excursions around lake Mälaren. The major part of them depicts former military areas and a specific landscape – created through military exercise –from abandoned bunkers and bandwagons to the less visible toxic contamination of soil.

Westerlund borrows an associative style of narration from early Soviet science fiction similar to the way Tarkovsky adapted Boris and Arkadij Strugatskijs novel “Piknik na obochine” (Roadside picnic) for the screen in “Stalker” (1979).

In the same way science fiction often has been interpreted as social critique, Westerlund’s work deals with questions of environmental justice and the anthropocene through the practice of ornithology or fairytales.

Teckningar till Antropofagernas rike II av I.B. Sundström, 2020

Teckningar i blyerts, för I.B Sundströms skiva "Antropofagernas rike II". 

Skivan släpps den 21 aug 2020 på Teg Publishing.

The wish machine, 2020

Materialiteters samtidiga genomsläpplighet och motstånd; skisser vid våtmarker, 2020

Materialiteters samtidiga genomsläpplighet och motstånd- skisser vid våtmarker. Akvarell på papper.