Membran

Peter Trukenbrod & Barbara Ekström
Short Exhibition
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Our aim to make reality more comprehensible has often resulted in making the world flatter.

Stories become book pages, views become images, the play is shown as film, and the world wide digital web manifests as – a screen. Even houses are sometimes being manufactured with wallboard panels, making the brick wall only a couple of centimeters wide. The Germans call it "Plattenbau".

The idea is of course that the multifaceted, experienced reality is reborn when the book page is being read, the image is seen, canvasses and screens are observed, and people move in between the wafer-thin walls in their wallboard houses.

Our aim with the exhibition is to examine just how the world is reborn out of the flatness. With one of the flattest materials we have been able to find as its starting point: dried jellyfish.

The jellyfish were collected on a desolate beach where they must have been washed up and left without any means to get back to their proper element. The find was made several years ago. We have noticed that we often recall this find in our minds in order to evoke the memory of the day, the mood, and the time – as if the dried fragments were a window to sea, light, memory.

On reflection, some of the techniques and methods that are used in art resemble this very type of "coats" that the jellyfish constitute – a form of membrane that allows for separate worlds to meet. In our exhibition we present projections and physical artifacts as support for discussions on the subject.