Anna-Karin Rasmusson, The Care
Pictures from solo exhibition at Cecilia Hillström Gallery in Stockholm 2020. Installation pictures: Jean-Baptiste Béranger.
Anna-Karin Rasmusson, born in 1983, lives and works in Stockholm. With painting and everyday life as a starting point, Anna-Karin mainly works with video installations that illuminate complex feelings of inadequacy, disorientation, empathy and tenderness. She herself acts in large, built-up scenographies or in the projection of earlier videos and thus creates double layers in the image. The result is a multifaceted, collage-like composition of recognizable, everyday environments and inner, mental spaces.
Anna-Karin Rasmusson holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2016). She participated in The Modern Exhibition 2018 and last year she also exhibited at Den Frie in Copenhagen, Strandverket in Marstrand, Växjö Konsthall, Konstepidemin in Gothenburg and Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen as well as several galleries. Her video installation Mater Nostra is now part of the collections of Moderna Museet and Gothenburg Art Museum. Awards and grants include the IASPIS studio grant in Stockholm (2018), the Bernadotte Award (2016) and this year the Stockholm City Cultural Award and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s one-year working grant (2019). She is represented by Cecilia Hillström Gallery in Stockholm.
Anna-Karin Rasmusson, THE CARE, 20 February–28 March 2020, Cecilia Hillström Gallery
Text: Pia Kristoffersson
Those previously familiar with Anna-Karin Rasmusson’s highly acclaimed works will immediately recognize her distinct visual idiom. Rasmusson’s works move freely between painting, installation and animation in an intuitive process where one thing leads to another. The scenographic framing is rough and seemingly sloppy in its expression, and as is always the case in Rasmusson’s installations, in an exceptionally conscious dialogue with the site itself.
In the exhibition’s video installation, THE CARE (2020), Rasmusson continues her analysis of the inherent states, roles and power relationships of being. The duality between the inner and outer worlds of existence are brought into sharp focus. The word care easily associates to the formalized and salaried caregiving in the service of the community that can entail an involvement in both the earliest phase of life as well as the final stage of intellectual and bodily degradation. Needs vary over time, whereas the roles of the helper and those in need of help, advantage and dependency, remain more or less the unchanged.
It is difficult not to read similar fragments of a lifecycle into Rasmusson’s latest piece, presented in the form of a life-size floor projection. In one sequence, two figures create a kinship around a very small creature, and in another, a frustrated body lurches back and forth in anguish. Yet another shows an abject figure surrendering to an intruder from the subconscious, who somewhat triumphantly blackens existence. The super-ego’s upper-hand advantage. Leaking, skinless bodies, deprived of their outermost protective layer, trapped on the limited space formed by slipshod beds made of taped-together scraps of paper – the fragile platform of everything. The atmosphere is feverish and claustrophobic, and at times tender-hearted. The various layers of the projections interact and intervene with each other, clumsy hands awkwardly try to help, comfort, console and caress. It is all deeply human, disturbing and moving.
Frida Sandström writes in ARTFORUM about THE CARE.
Pictures from solo exhibition at Cecilia Hillström Gallery in Stockholm 2020. Installation pictures: Jean-Baptiste Béranger.