Cecilia Lundqvist

C / 2001 / 2' 37"


SAUNA
Stockholm, Sweden

www.sauna.st/front.html


THE VIDEO

C

Cecilia Lundqvist works with videos through animating her own drawings, mediating tales of human relationships and not shying away from life's darker and more destructive sides. For Lundqvist animation as a medium is very important, the control in being an animator offers her the possibility of creating works where nothing happens by accident. Through this control she manages to tell stories that are very personal, yet she's keeping a distance to the viewer.

C is an animation that consists of five different, simply shaped scenarios. The separate scenes, presented by two young girls, all reflect a slow change between a state of "good" and "evil".

Cecilia Lundqvist wants to show what could happen when children, given the opportunity and the impulse, switch from being harmless to wanting to hurt somebody else. Somehow this gliding state of mind appears very subtly. This wickedness, which usually is well hidden under the innocent appearance of a small child, now and then shows its face and puts the surrounding world into a state of chock and incomprehensibility.


THE ARTIST

Cecilia Lundqvist

Cecilia Lundqvist belongs to a generation of younger Swedish artists graduated from the University Collage of Arts, Crafts & Design in Stockholm. Originally a construction engineer, she altered her career in 1991 into arts, and since 1994 she has been working mainly with animated videos, which have frequently been screened at museums and film festivals far beyond the Swedish borders. Lundqvist is represented with video works at the Modern Museum of Art in Stockholm among other institutions.


THE SPACE/COLLECTIVE

SAUNA

Short:

SAUNA is a newly started space for contemporary art which is run by people already active within different disciplines such as art, design, journalism, music, film and architecture. The space and its activities are run on a non-commercial basis and aim to function as a platform and resource for contemporary art both at a spatial and an idea based level.
Sauna offer artists and others active within the cultural sphere, both in and outside of Sweden, the possibilities of an exhibition space working with ideas of how to alter and expand rooms for contemporary art. We also want to contribute to a process of acquainting the Swedish audience with an art form that is not distanced from life itself, current developments in society as well as the most vital discourses for the individual and the collective.

Maybe this is not your traditional idea of an artist run space since it's run by artists, curators, artchitects etc together, but I ask you to reconsider having Sauna and the Swedish artist Cecilia Lundqvist in your project.

Long:

SAUNA is a newly started space for contemporary art that is run by people already active within different disciplines such as art, design, journalism, economy, music, film and architecture. The space and its activities are run on a non-commercial basis and aim to function as a platform and resource for contemporary art both at a spatial and an idea based level.

Sauna offer artists and others active within the cultural sphere, both in and outside of Sweden, the possibilities of an exhibition space working with ideas of how to alter and expand rooms for contemporary art. We also want to contribute to a process of acquainting the Swedish audience with an art form that is not distanced from life itself, current developments in society as well as the most vital discourses for the individual and the collective.

Therefore Sauna starts off its activities with The Expanded Space, which is the first project and starting point, inviting artists, architects, and designers etc to create and present works that intersects and discusses issues surrounding the office space of 21 square meters by Slussen in central Stockholm, Sweden and the parameters set up by the people working there.

Since the start Sauna, among various projects, have produced a video screening of contemporary Swedish art including artists like Jonas Dahlberg, Gunilla Klingberg and Annika Eriksson for the Swedish exhibition For you Mongolia shown in Ulan Bator in 2002. The screening program was shown in women prisons and also invited children living in the streets to the art museum. At Stockholm Art Fair 2003, Sauna created a booth for the cultural magazine Mars. The booth was created both to reflect Sauna's project The Expanded Space as well as providing a place to hide away from the buzz of the fair and sink into reading Mars The booth was created in collaboration with the architects Per Sderberg and Albert France-Lanord and was constructed with the help of children from a local school. Inside the booth "moving wallpaper" created by the filmmakers Martin Malm and Jakob Hallberg was projected. In April/May Norwegian artist Lars Traegde showed L'Orangerie, a project consisting of a mobile orangery integrated into Saunas office space, a soil less garden, a system of roots that may travel the world to wherever you may be. The orangery demands neither daylight nor soil and is run by a technique that's developed in cooperation with NASA. A frightening reality appears where everything may live without taking part in nature's own circulation.

The people running Sauna are: Joanna Sandell & Helena Scragg in collaboration with Johanna Billing, Jakob Hallberg, Ulrika Karlsson, Knut Kainz Rognerud, Pia Kristoffersson, and sa-Viktoria Wihlborg.

Sauna
Bastugatan 1
118 20 Stockholm
Sweden
+46 (0)70 417 49 58 Joanna Sandell
+46 (0)73 695 67 09 Helena Scragg
artprojects(at)sauna.st
www.sauna.st/front.html