Mats Adelman and Ylva Westerlund.
Dream Wasteland
Moscow Museum of Modern Art Education Center
February 10 - March 6, 2022.
Dream Wasteland by Ylva Westerlund and Mats Adelman is the first exhibition in the Northern Travelogue program. This art project explores the natural environment of the Järva Field in the Stockholm suburbs. Since 2016, the artists have been conducting field excursions, to use their own term, studing birds, biotopes, wetlands and traces of human activity in the area. Their reflections result in works recognising the coexistence of human and non-human actors as an integral factor of today's reality, while the interplay of natural and cultural phenomena gives rise to possible alternatives.
The Järva Field is a natural reserve and a unique example of biodiversity. Being in close proximity to a bustling metropolis, the area has been the least affected by the negative processes of urbanization, since from 1919 to 1970 it was given over to the Stockholm garrison for military exercises and was closed to the public. Today, the fate of the area is once again being tested, with its natural environment being very fragile.
One of the central objects in the exhibition is Westerlund's wall painting Speak Creek. Using the feminist optics of new materialism, she creates a space of interpenetration informed by the fluidity, vibration, and vacillation of agents, ideas, fantasies, feelings, and time. This approach can also be discerned in other works in the exhibition, such as the series of watercolors Exo migratory movements. The wasteland that appears in the drawings looks abandoned, but only at first glance. Like The Zone by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, to whose works the artist refers, the territory she describes is a bare and overt projection of our reality. Instead of the author's first-person narration, Westerlund gives a voice to the surrounding landscape with its inhabitants. Water currents, migratory birds, toxins, mud, footprints become heard in a ringing emptiness.
The departure from a direct statement is a common feature in the artists’ works. The Järva field — located in the periphery — is perceived by them as a place sensitive to changes, fractures and the possibilities presented there. Adelman's and Westerlund's graphic work, The Last Machine, narrating walks and observations, breaks off with somnambulistic reveries about a perpetual motion machine in a world without humans... Unlike science, which tries to verify or falsify the hypothesis put forward, art, like science fiction, unwinds and transforms ideas. As Umberto Eco wrote, “...science fiction is the prose of the hypothesis”. That is how we can characterize Westerlund's graphic novel The New Hird, a comic book story set in a futuristic world telling us about the ecological catastrophe of the near future.
The artists do not pursue an encyclopedic project with their creative method. In the sculptures and watercolors that make up the series Bird Studies in Watercolor and Bird Studies in Wood, Adelman does not attempt to catalog and present dominant knowledge of the observed species. His approach is driven by a desire to encounter the unexplored and to capture that experience. The problems of describing and interpreting such an encounter are addressed in Suspended animation, filmed by Adelman with a Super 8 camera. In the joint exhibition project, Ylva Westerlund and Mats Adelman create a space of specific visibility. They manage to reduce the distance between various agents in a shared ecology.
Exhibition curator: Anastasia Nefedova
