Ann-Sofi Sidén, 3 MPH (Horse to Rocket), 2002–2003 © Ann-Sofi Sidén

Ann-Sofi Sidén

In Between the Best of Worlds

20.11 2004 – 20.3 2005

Stockholm

Ann-Sofi Sidén, born 1962, has long been recognized as a leading figure on the international art scene. In the last few years there have been major exhibitions of her work at Hayward Gallery in London, at Musée d’Art Moderna de la Ville de Paris and at the Secession in Vienna. The new exhibition at Moderna Museet includes several of her most important works and represents the largest presentation of her art to date.

Dealing with such issues as vulnerability, control, violence and surveillance, Ann-Sofi Sidén unravels some of the threads of the human psyche’s history. Her method is a suggestive mixture of journalism, feature film and scientific research that takes form in sculptural installations or in spatial video works. The dominant feeling is often one of being caught in a system – political, economic or social – or of realizing that one is somewhere in between systems.

The exhibition comprises five large installations by Ann-Sofi Sidén. These are key works from 1990 up to the present. Two of them, 3 MPH and QM Museum, are being shown in Sweden for the first time.

In her Who Told the Chambermaid? (1988), the hotel cleaner has taken over visual control of the hotel with the help of 17 surveillance cameras. The silent, rhythmically pulsing and changing images draw the viewer into the hotel rooms from cellar to attic. In her kaleidoscopic works Ann-Sofi Sidén mirrors a place or a condition through different characters – discovered, borrowed, real or invented – that she herself, and to a degree the viewer too, can portray.

In 1994 Ann-Sofi Sidén took part in an artistic project in a building on 53 West 9th Street in New York. This was where the American psychiatrist Alice E. Fabian had lived alone for many years. Her encounter with reminders of Alice Fabian’s life left its mark on several of Ann-Sofi Sidén’s works, not least It’s by Confining One’s Neighbor that One is Convinced of One’s Own Sanity (1995). Both the inner and the purely physical conditions of the psychiatrist’s isolated world appear in this work.

Advertisements for psychoactive drugs from Alice E. Fabian’s collection of American psychiatric periodicals form the basis for the installation Would a Course of Deprol Have Saved van Gogh’s Ear? (1996). In this work Ann-Sofi Sidén makes use of repetition, using it to illustrate how the pharmaceutical industry sells its wares by conjuring up an image of a system in a state of crisis. Focus is on the boundary zones between science, society and people’s inner lives.

With her Queen of Mud, also known as QM, since 1988 Ann-Sofi Sidén created a series of narratives in which the principal character is a mute, female being who is coated in mud. Just as in fairy tales, QM turns up in possible and impossible places in time and space, an abhorrent and wild mud queen who reveals society’s subconscious. “She has the ability to float into people’s dreams” a scientist remarks in a factual tone of voice in one of the “documentaries” that make up QM Museum – a gigantic digital archive that has been created for Moderna Museet. In the film QM, I Think I Call her QM, which now forms part of QM Museum, the Queen of Mud meets a psychiatrist who wakes up one morning to find QM under his bed.

Ann-Sofi Sidén maps social behaviour and phenomena like exoticism and the mechanisms of exclusion which are such an important aspect of the history of Western civilization. One of her most recent works – 3 MPH (three miles per hour) from 2003 – was filmed during a 25-day ride on horseback that the artist undertook in Texas and that is now being shown in the museum’s collections. The ride started in San Antonio and ended at Ground Control, NASA’s space-research centre in Houston. The 35-minute film in panorama format is concerned with visible and invisible boundaries and it cuts through a stream of social and cultural layers in present-day Texas.

Catalogue

A richly illustrated catalogue is being produced in collaboration with Steidl verlag (Göttingen). The catalogue contains essays by Kathryn Kanjo (ArtPace, San Antonio) and Cecilia Widenheim as well as the record of a conversation between Ann-Sofi Sidén and Robert Fleck.

Curator: Cecilia Widenheim

More about this exhibition