MMP: Maria Lindberg

Because these at once uncomfortable and humorous pictures only show fragments or isolated things and events – the kind one notes out of the corner of one’s eye but has trouble explaining – we as observers fill in what has been left out and in this way create the picture.

Observation is a key word in Maria Lindberg’s work. Her own observations from everyday life often place the peripheral in the centre. Just as she focuses on what seems irrelevant, her activities and staged situations take place in the background, without being documented. Parallel with working with pictures Maria Lindberg has made discreet interventions in the world around her for 20 years: simply constructed private investigations inspired by Fluxus art, an international movement which in the 1960s reformulated traditional concepts of art by perceiving everyday life with new eyes, mixing painting, sculpture, performance, music, poetry and film, mass producing art and, not least, working collectively.

Many of Maria Lindberg’s interventions express a longing for contact. During bus trips in Bohuslän in 1988 she hid messages, saying for example ‘end of the world’, in buildings and other constructions which were expected to last forever. On three separate occasions she has placed a wallet with her own address and a small sum of money in public places, for instance, on a chair in a museum. Since the 1970s she has been sending letters to herself – but to post restante addresses all over the world, to far away places where she would like to be. After a while the letters are returned to the sender – surprisingly perhaps, considering how far afield they could have strayed – often leaving an impressive trail behind them.

When Maria Lindberg leads off the Moderna Museet Projekt in conjunction with the museum’s ‘professional opening’, Friday the 13th of February, she is tempting destiny by making a one way journey by car on just that day, crossing the country from Gothenburg where she lives to Stockholm. In light of her feeling for the drastic, the title “Friday the 13th” seems fateful; even if we live in a rational and secular society, we are influenced by popular beliefs and religious notions. She challenges destiny but also simply wants to see what happens. When Maria Lindberg makes her journey to the opening of the Moderna Museeet, it also confirms that the museum belongs to the whole country and not just the capital.

This journey, “Friday the 13th” will be documented on video, filmed behind the car’s rear window. In this we as spectators get a chance to observe in real time what happened during the trip – or what did not happen. Maria Lindberg herself has said that there is more action when the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, in the piece “Zyclus”, pours water from one glass to another until the water is all gone, than there is in a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Curator: Maria Lind