About

Jonas Dahlberg (b. 1970) lives and works in Stockholm Sweden. He studied architecture at Lunds Technical High School from 1993 to 1995. From 1995 to 2000 he studied art at Malmö Art Academy where he received his M.F.A. in 2000. Since 2000 he has developed a series of videos that primarily consist of slow movements through architectural spaces. The videos are created by building miniaturized architectural sets that are filmed through experimental methods.

In addition to video and video installation, his practice includes public art works, sculptures, commissions, book projects and photography. In June 2012 he will complete a set design for an opera at the Grand Theatre in Geneva.

Through his installations, be they video or otherwise, Jonas Dahlberg works with space. Architecture is addressed as a political place that influences how we understand ourselves, and how the body and mind experience the outside world.

Among other exhibitions  Index Foundation Stockholm (2001), Manifesta 4 Frankfurt (2002), Italian Pavillion at 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003), National representative for Sweden at 26th Bienal de São Paolo (2004), Momentum 04 Moss (2004), Modern Museum Stockholm (2005), Marian Goodman Paris (2005), FRAC Dijon (2006), Taipei Biennal (2006), Leeum Museum of Art Seoul (2007) Kunsthalle Wien (2008), Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2009), Galerie Nordenhake (2010, 2008, 2006, 2004) The Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2010),  Prospect II New Orleans Biennial (2011).

Lectures/workshops/studio talks include venues such as Architecture Association London,  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Bergen National Academy of the Arts,  KTH School of Architecture Stockholm, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design Stockholm, The Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, Valand School of fine Art University of Gotheburg and Beckmans college of Design Stockholm.

Current

April

​Work in progress. Archive of architectural memories of rooms/places in filmsFor more information and to participate with a memory for the archive please click to read more.In my work I have for several years been very interested in architecture and how it induces certain psychological conditions and shapes memory. I am now working on building up an archive of people’s memories of locations that are influenced by film. I’m writing to ask you if you would share with me at least one of your memories - or even a flash of a thought - that involves a room, space, place, or site that you remember from a film. What interests me are the memory image(s) that pop up in your mind, that originates from a movie, when you think of a certain kind of room or location.  For example: "When I think of [a hotel room], or am in [a hotel room], I see [scene from a movie…] before me. Other rooms could be: ports/harbors, airports, railway stations, hotel lobbies, university campuses, mosques, churches, roads, streets, backstreets, hot dog stands, tunnels, cabins, synagogues, parks, restaurants, court houses, post and bank offices, hospitals, parking shelters, bars, graveyards, penthouses, libraries, museums, schools, offices, sports stadiums, public squares, gardens, residential buildings, ships, stairwells, garages, kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, toilets, backyards, basements, attics, hallways, tool sheds, closets, wardrobes, prison cells, artist studios, etc. I am more interested in the architectural aspects of the space - your memory of how it looked, architecture, details, furniture, objects, light and sound - rather than what you remember from the story line and/or characters, although these descriptions are definitely welcome as well. I would be very grateful if you could reply with a few lines describing the space, place, site, or room. In your response please tell me which film the space is drawn from. All films, high and low, new or old, are equally valid. It is not important that your memory from the film is “accurate”.  We often remember things very differently from how they really happened, how long it took for something to happen, whether it was day or night, etc.  Though there is no deadline for an answer, a quick reply is most appreciated.  Again, it can be a flash of a thought so not feel pressure to spend a long time formulating your response even though lengthy and layered responses are more than welcome!  Your answers will be placed along with the specific film clip in an archive and organized with different categories, such as types of spaces, urban/rural, time period, film genre, etc. The archive may serve as the basis for a number of works, and possibly a publication.  It is likely that in some way, I would like to eventually list all the people who have contributed with memories, but will seek your approval in advance. Thank you!Jonas Dahlberg Please send your contribution to: filmarchive@jonasdahlberg.com Ps. Please feel free to share this request with others you think would be interested.  

May

Group exhibition. Cinema - Voorkamer. May 11 - July 8 2012

Voorkamer, Lier, Belgium (www.voorkamer.be)

June

Group exhibition. The spirit of the place - Artipelag konsthall. June 1 - September 30 2012

Opening on May 31st. Artipelag, Stockholm (www.artipelag.se)

Scenography - Grand Théâtre de Genève. Premieres on June 13th 2012 (following 15th, 18th, 21st, 24th, 26th)

Opera scenography for Macbeth. Grand Théâtre de Genève, Boulevard du Théâtre 11, Geneve (www.geneveopera.com)

August

Group exhibition. The human condition - Bradbury Gallery. August 23 - September 28 2012

Bradbury Gallery, State University, Arkansas (www.astate.edu/bradburygallery)

October

Commission. Temporary urban research lab. October 1 - December 31 2012 

New commission. Using the old Post Office building at Nybrogatan 53, Stockholm. Produced by Mobile Art Production (www.mobileartproduction.se).

Solo exhibition at Göteborg konsthall. October 26 2012 - January 15 2013

Göteborg Konsthall, Götaplatsen, Göteborg (www.konsthallen.goteborg.se)

November

Solo exhibition at Archizoom. November 7 - December 8 2012

Archizoom, EPFL–ENAC–ARCHIZOOM, SG 1211 (SG Building), Station 15, Lausanne (http://archizoom.epfl.ch/)

Art work for KTH and School of Architecture entrance. To be completed 2015

New art work for for KTH campus entrance (Royal Institute of Technology) and School of Architecture (New building Tham & Videgård www.tvark.se), Stockholm. Produced by The Swedish National Public Art Council.

Video works

Shadow Room

2011. Single channel installation. HD video. Black and white. Silent. Duration 10:31 min (continuous loop). Projection dimension ~ 4 x 3 meters.

In Shadow Room the camera pans back and forth inside a room, recalling the movement of a surveillance camera. With each successive round, the room fills with tree shadows until the room is completely immersed, and obscured, by shadows of nature. The film references Vampire (1932) by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Nostalghia (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky.

​Click to read more. More text soon.

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View Through a Park

2009. Single channel installation. HD video. Color. Silent. Duration 16:58 min (continuous loop). Projection dimension ~ 4 x 2,25 meters.

In View Through a Park the viewer follows a single camera movement from the interior of one apartment, through an idyllic city park, to its facing apartment. Set at night, the dreamlike shot travels endlessly between these two buildings, transforming from a non-physical journey for the viewer through the park - to a furtive, intruding gaze within the private spaces. The work was made by filming in a large constructed set design model of Gramercy Park - the only remaining private park on Manhattan in New York.  Contrary to its appearance, and paradoxical in terms of the history of filmmaking, View Through a Park is in fact a film in color, depicting a setting that is black and white.

​Click to read more. More text soon.

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Three Rooms

2008. Three channel installation. HD video. Black and white. Silent. Duration 26:58 min loop. Dimensions 46 Inch LCD monitors.

Three Rooms shows three archetypical domestic environments, that during the course of each film, dissolve leaving only a series of bare spaces. Objects which are thin disappear gradually. Other thicker objects whose mass is unevenly distributed involve a process of falling over and breaking before they, too, disappear.

The environments were constructed in paraffin to make the detailed models of each room. When placed into a heated solvent solution, the paraffin melted like ice in warm water, changing the environments from a solid to a liquid form.

​Click to read more. Jonas Dahlberg’s Three Rooms is an installation consisting of three large screens separated by gaps of 1.5-2 metres in a black, silent room. The three different rooms shown on the three screens are similarly lit, accommodating shadow and shade, similarly occupied by generic modern domestic objects and of a similar spatiality. The spectator cannot avoid the impression of seeing a living room, a dining room and a bedroom on the screens. During the course of twenty-six minutes the objects in the rooms dissolve, leaving only the lighting and the bare space. Objects which are thin disappear gradually. Other thicker objects whose mass is unevenly distributed involve a process of falling over and breaking before they, too, disappear. As the objects degrade the rooms seem transformed into landscapes of dissolution and finally we are left with a vacancy defined only by the light and the planes of the wall. This visual experience, however, is not independent. It is subject to the duration of the installation and the way in which time works within it. At one level the passage of time seems slow. We wait and nothing happens. But at another level it seems infinitely fast. Both are true. The effect of slowness is because the events of the video take place at a slower rate than we normally associate with movement and especially with destruction. The destruction of objects is normally experienced as a break in time rather than the use of prolonged duration. At the same time the video is experienced as an immense speeding up of events. We realize we are watching not a scene of violence or destruction but rather, an infinitely slow natural process of decay, erosion and dissolution. The time of this process is not chronological time but some other kind of time. We might think of it almost as biological or geological time. This corresponds in the video to the fact that at a certain point when the objects of a domestic room have already degraded, we pass into what looks more like a landscape of partial objects and finally into a desert which shows only the indecipherable footprints of objects. Dahlberg has found a way to abolish objects through a process which is uniform and slow and therefore akin to a natural process whether we think of evolution or ecological change or geological causality – all slow, uniform pressures. The video stays calmly and grimly with the logic of what causes the object to disappear. The spectator who wishes to explain what he sees in terms of ‘events’ will experience the collapse of the shade of a standard lamp as a sudden event as a way of providing a narrative. But what the video shows us is a causality which cannot be reduced to a narrative. The account of the unmaking of objects shows, in one way or another, the triumph of matter over form. Central here is a certain reworking of ideas of nature. If nature were thought of, as it often has been, as a certain potentiality and fecundity of forms, then the scene enacted in Dahlberg’s installation might traditionally be thought of as the occasion for the experience of sublimity in which the subject realizes that ultimately the vastness of the universe reduces him, not to an irrelevant particle, but rather teaches the subject the true and infinite scale of its subjectivity. But here, in the unblinking gravity of Three Rooms we see a nature bent only towards the erosion and the erasure of all forms. For the spectator, the outcome is a desolation beyond subjectivity. Mark Cousins, Architectural Association, London and London Consortium (University of London)

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Invisible Cities

2004. Single channel installation. HD Video. Color. Silent. Duration 47:22 min (continuous loop). Projection dimension minimum 4,5 x 3,4 meter.

Invisible Cities depicts a slow, almost weightless flight through what seems to be a deserted city where the only thing that reminds us of some life, are birds flying next to the central square. The sky is clear as the camera passes different archetypical aspects of any small northern European city: private housing blocks, high rises, industrial areas, shopping streets and a railway station leading to a central square.

The work took its conceptual starting point in reflecting that while we often speak of mega-cities that grow and generate new conditions and problems for urban living.  Sometimes, we talk of rural areas and their depopulation, their insufficient or excessive funding. But we rarely talk of the in-between cities. The ones that exist without much change and where a large part of the world's population lives.

In the film, the viewer is guided through one of these Invisible Cities. The Swedish bright summer night transforms the fully functioning city into a ghost town, as the filming of Invisible Cities was done in the middle of the night, when residents were sleeping.

The work is produced with the help from Konstnärsnämnden - the Swedish Arts Grants Committee & Moderna Museet, Stockholm

​Click to read more.You do not enter the cities of Jonas Dahlberg, you slide into them, and the more you hope to immerge into them either with your own approach to his photographs, or through the subjective point of view of the camera in his videos, the more you stay on the surface of walls. The openings, doors and windows are not obturated, they are just missing. The surface appears to have sucked them up. Jonas Dahlberg’s city is blind, deaf and dumb, a body without organs, a disorganized entirety (understand ‘disfunctionalized’) in which the fluxes of the spectator’s sliding gaze just occur. Vision of a naked architecture without any outcomes or opposites, the houses figure as minimal sculptures set one after another. There is no evident indication of any kind of life in those pictures there are of course no characters, and very often the urban signals have disappeared. Nature has been petrified. In the artist’s mind, the invisible cities are the conglomerations that count too many inhabitants (over 10,000) to be considered as villages and too little (less than 100,000) to become mere capitals. Average applicants in the urban hierarchy, they stand for the places forgotten by both the panoptic eye of the mass media and the political range. The architects themselves seem never to have found them, even though 550 millions of beings appear to live there.The project Invisible Cities, undertaken in 2004, includes photographs, videos, books, and even wallpaper, sort of an endless list looking somehow like a telephone directory and a memorial. Dahiberg unrolls several thousand names of those cities, which sank into oblivion. To state a surname has got other functions than simply indicate. It is more than an indication, a gesture a finger pointed at somebody; in a way, it is equivalent to a description (1). Between indication and description is the exact place where Dahlberg’s works are located. They waver between the outside world and bias, between stifling oddness and sweet melancholy. Mingled with the artist’s critical view upon these zones, comes out a certain emotion: the setting is steady but stands in a form of aesthetic perfection As in Italo Calvino’s novel, the title having been borrowed by Jonas Dahlberg for his own purpose, the question is not restricted to the field of urbanism or organization of territories, but is enlarged to a poetical abstraction made of sensations and memories. Guillaume Mansart, Ideal City - Invisible City. (Catalogue text)

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Weightless Space

2004. Single channel installation. Video. Color. Silent. Duration 22:10 min (continuous loop). Projection dimension ~ 4 x 3 meters.

In Weightless Space the viewer follows a potted plant and errant bubbles while they float around, seemingly weightless and unaffected by gravity.  The only light source in the drab 1970s room comes from the slightly opened door.  To make the work, the scene was filmed by placing the room inside of an aquarium filled with glycerol.  The aquarium was then fixed to a gyroscope that when rotated created the weightless effect.

​Click to read more.In Jonas Dahlberg’s video Weightless Space, the work that comes closest of any in the exhibition to expressing pure abstract space, the walls are the only feature of which one can be certain. Projected onto a false wall, creating the illusion of an extension of the box made to house it, the video shows a conventional, empty 1970s room, with a door slightly open to a brightly lit outside. The only object is a pot with a green plant that floats slowly around the room as if unaffected by gravity. The process of watching this endless film that focuses solely on weightlessness changes the viewer’s perception of their own body, bound by gravity, as unusually heavy. Having been seduced by the mesmeric movement of the pot, the viewer’s reactions shift to physical discomfort and loneliness, caught between his being and empty space. Although the room presented is the kind of neutral environment that we pass through on a daily basis, because the room itself is stripped back to the fundamentals of floor, walls and ceiling, our normal experiences of time and space become disorientated, the familiar uncanny.Weightless Space appears to be digitally manipulated, but is in fact created by a camera movement through an artificially constructed space. A model of the room, placed in an aquarium filled with glycerol, was connected to a camera and the entire structure attached to a gyroscope which rotated the model in front of the camera. Dahlberg’s comment that ‘as an artist I can command a space perhaps even more fully than an architect who always has to hand over his creation’ affects one’s reading of Weightless Space. Although the model is an autonomous environment, not dissimilar from an architect’s model, it is designed purely to produce an illusory image of a timeless, science-fiction type environment. Felicity Lunn, Interior View; Artists explore the language of architecture. (Catalogue text) 

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One-Way Street

2002. Single channel installation. Video. Black and white. Silent. Duration 3:48 min (continuous loop). Projection dimensions minimum 4 x 3 meters.

In One-way Street the camera moves in an even pace on a deserted night-time city street that has glass buildings and street lamps whose lights are reflected on the wet asphalt. As the forward motion continues down the street, new building blocks persistently appear from the darker far end of the street.

The film was shot in a 9-meter long architectural model.  In order for this seemingly endless forward movement to occur without revealing a track upon which a camera would customarily be placed for a tracking shot, the model was designed and built so that the curbs of the sidewalks would serve as a track that supports a small wooden wagon with an engine.

​Click to read more.Jonas Dahlberg’s new installation, “One-Way Street” (2002), compels the viewer to step into a deserted street and seemingly walk with an even pace, not toward anything in particular, but through a cityscape balancing the psychological and concrete. The truth of “One-Way Street” does not depend on an absolute meaning. It is created by the viewer through the play between familiar images, personal memories and the imagination. Street lamps, bulidings with glass facades, and tiny alleys line both sides of the street. The lighting is dark and dramatic. As the buildings pass endlessly, conjuring the memory of some difficult, sleepless night - a feeling of fear rises up, reminding the viewer of the personal crises each individual faces every day. The irrational side can take hold in this street.The viewer desires to see inside a building or around a corner or down an alley - to find some sort of concrete human form. But alas, there is no choice but to continue walking. Eventually, if one takes the time, elegant abstract images reveal themselves in the window reflections or in hte light’s reflection in the damp street. A form of meditation begins. Dahlberg transports architecture to a psychological realm through the medium of film. The viewer is led into a world created by the artist, who designed the model before filming it. In two earlier pieces, “Untitled (Horizontal Sliding)” and “Untitled (Vertical Sliding)”, the focus is primarily on the literal, architectural interiors - empty rooms side by side or one after another, as if going down a hotel elevator. In these works, he experiments with spatial relations as well as with the depiction of loneliness.With “One-Way Street”, we see an evolution in Dahlberg’s work, fram an emphasis on literal architectural structure towards a more dynamic play with abstraction, marked by his use of theatrical lighting and reflected images of an almost dreamlike quality. In the Jungian sense, abstraction’s purpose is to break the object’s hold on the subject, thus freeing the content from old meanings. When this separation occurs, as it does in Dahlberg’s work, the space for new meanings opens up. Lauren Amazeen, Tema Celelste No 94 November/December 2002

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Untitled (Vertical Sliding)

2001. Single channel installation. Video. Black and white. Silent. Duration 28:26 min (continuous loop). Projection dimension minimum 4 x 3 meters.

Untitled (Vertical Sliding) is a looped 28 min and 26 second video that shows a continuous tracking shot where the camera travel downwards, like in an open elevator revealing hotel corridors, one after another.  The film was shot in a panoptic architectural model where the camera rotates in the centre of the model replacing the gaze of the watchtower in the panopticon. Since the building is constructed in a circle and the camera rotates in the middle it creates both an architectural and a filmic loop.

​Click to read more.People move around buildings, to state the obvious; but buildings also move around people - sometimes very noticeably, as the organizers of Milch were recently reminded. Vibrations from a nearby railway station kept disrupting the careful calibration of Jonas Dahlberg’s video installation Untitled (Horizontal Sliding), 2000 and Untitled (Vertical Sliding), 2001, shaking equipment and causing slivers of projected light to trespass into places they shouldn’t have - a curator’s nightmare, but fortuitously underlining the themes of revelation and concealment set up in this painstakingly prepared and thoughtful piece. Built space fascinates Dahlberg, a former architecture student. His moving camera assumes an investigative stance, yet the footage it produces consistently fixes the viewer’s attention on blind spots, unknowable spaces where the camera can’t probe nor light reach.Two freestanding projection screens, parallel to one another, show monochrome video sequences. One screen eclipses the other, forcing viewers to circle around in vain search for a vantage point permitting a simultaneous view of both. On one screen, a camera (apparently) tracking horizontally seems to travel through solid walls, revealing a sequence of empty rooms, each giving onto yet more distant spaces. With their high ceilings, paneled dadoes, and polished floors, the rooms were graceful, but also tatty and melancholic - in need of renovation, as a realtor might say. Projection number two has the camera descending, elevator-style, past floor after floor, visiting a seemingly endless succession of passageways, each different yet all decorated with the same faintly patterned floral wallpaper. Light - maybe daylight, maybe artificial, it s impossible to tell - seeps from under closed doors, but there’s no reason to think anyone’s home - or rather, in their rooms, since these liminal spaces most closely resemble hotel corridors.Appearances, of course, prove deceptive. Dahlberg’s sets are architectural models, built to a circular plan, and filmed with a centrally positioned rotating camera - hence the seamless continuity of the installation’s footage. What seem to be tracking shots are really ten-minute, 360 degree pans, describing loci that inevitably read as nodes in a labyrinth - a subtly scary one, since its vertical and horizontal extension implies the impossibility of finding an external vantage point. Taking the panopticon as its starting point, Dahlberg’s investigation suggests a psychoanalytic appropriation of the panoptic model, revealing the surveying self as itself both self-surveying and vulnerable to surveillance. Might there be hiders in the house, unseen presences behind those half-closed doors and darkened entrances? The camera’s full-circle pan becomes readable as a paranoid attempt to watch one’s own back. This is territory Dahlberg has charted before, in Safe Zones I: to fetch a sweater, 1996, Spying out the apartm ents overlooking his, the artist found that a gun collector occupied one. Dahlberg calculated the “safe zones” in his own home, paths from room to room that were outside his neighbor’s potential line of fire. Following these, he shot photographic evidence of his neighbor’s hobby, but also videoed his own convoluted progress through the zones, a fugitive in his own house.With the reflexive moment of philosophical thought, Cornelius Castoriadis writes, “Things are no longer simply juxtaposed: the nearest is the furthest, and the forks in the road...have become simultaneous, mutually intersecting. The entrance to the labyrinth is at one of its centers - or rather, we no longer know whether there is a center, what a center is.” And Umberto Eco observes that multicursal labyrinths (like Dahlberg’s) need no Minotaur, because in them one can make mistakes - the visitor’s own errors play the monster’s devouring role. Dahlberg’s labyrinthine experiment, manipulating categories of interior and exterior, serves as an ambiguous model of the philosophizing psyche, its mood delicately poised between lyrical reverie and creeping paranoia. Rachel Withers, Artforum September 2001

Untitled (Horizontal Sliding)

2000. Single channel installation. Video. Black and white. Silent. Duration 38:21 min (continuous loop). Projection dimension minimum 4 x 3 meters.

Untitled (Horizontal Sliding) is a looped 38 min and 21 second video that shows a continuous tracking shot in what seems to be an infinite early twentieth-century apartment. The camera slides horizontally and room after room passes from view in a slow pace. The film was shot in a panoptic architectural model where the camera rotates in the centre of the model, replacing the gaze of the watchtower in the panopticon. Since the building is constructed in a circle and the camera rotates in the middle, it creates both an architectural and a filmic loop.

​Click to read more.People move around buildings, to state the obvious; but buildings also move around people - sometimes very noticeably, as the organizers of Milch were recently reminded. Vibrations from a nearby railway station kept disrupting the careful calibration of Jonas Dahlberg’s video installation Untitled (Horizontal Sliding), 2000 and Untitled (Vertical Sliding), 2001, shaking equipment and causing slivers of projected light to trespass into places they shouldn’t have - a curator’s nightmare, but fortuitously underlining the themes of revelation and concealment set up in this painstakingly prepared and thoughtful piece. Built space fascinates Dahlberg, a former architecture student. His moving camera assumes an investigative stance, yet the footage it produces consistently fixes the viewer’s attention on blind spots, unknowable spaces where the camera can’t probe nor light reach.Two freestanding projection screens, parallel to one another, show monochrome video sequences. One screen eclipses the other, forcing viewers to circle around in vain search for a vantage point permitting a simultaneous view of both. On one screen, a camera (apparently) tracking horizontally seems to travel through solid walls, revealing a sequence of empty rooms, each giving onto yet more distant spaces. With their high ceilings, paneled dadoes, and polished floors, the rooms were graceful, but also tatty and melancholic - in need of renovation, as a realtor might say. Projection number two has the camera descending, elevator-style, past floor after floor, visiting a seemingly endless succession of passageways, each different yet all decorated with the same faintly patterned floral wallpaper. Light - maybe daylight, maybe artificial, it s impossible to tell - seeps from under closed doors, but there’s no reason to think anyone’s home - or rather, in their rooms, since these liminal spaces most closely resemble hotel corridors.Appearances, of course, prove deceptive. Dahlberg’s sets are architectural models, built to a circular plan, and filmed with a centrally positioned rotating camera - hence the seamless continuity of the installation’s footage. What seem to be tracking shots are really ten-minute, 360 degree pans, describing loci that inevitably read as nodes in a labyrinth - a subtly scary one, since its vertical and horizontal extension implies the impossibility of finding an external vantage point. Taking the panopticon as its starting point, Dahlberg’s investigation suggests a psychoanalytic appropriation of the panoptic model, revealing the surveying self as itself both self-surveying and vulnerable to surveillance. Might there be hiders in the house, unseen presences behind those half-closed doors and darkened entrances? The camera’s full-circle pan becomes readable as a paranoid attempt to watch one’s own back. This is territory Dahlberg has charted before, in Safe Zones I: to fetch a sweater, 1996, Spying out the apartm ents overlooking his, the artist found that a gun collector occupied one. Dahlberg calculated the “safe zones” in his own home, paths from room to room that were outside his neighbor’s potential line of fire. Following these, he shot photographic evidence of his neighbor’s hobby, but also videoed his own convoluted progress through the zones, a fugitive in his own house.With the reflexive moment of philosophical thought, Cornelius Castoriadis writes, “Things are no longer simply juxtaposed: the nearest is the furthest, and the forks in the road...have become simultaneous, mutually intersecting. The entrance to the labyrinth is at one of its centers - or rather, we no longer know whether there is a center, what a center is.” And Umberto Eco observes that multicursal labyrinths (like Dahlberg’s) need no Minotaur, because in them one can make mistakes - the visitor’s own errors play the monster’s devouring role. Dahlberg’s labyrinthine experiment, manipulating categories of interior and exterior, serves as an ambiguous model of the philosophizing psyche, its mood delicately poised between lyrical reverie and creeping paranoia. Rachel Withers, Artforum September 2001

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Commissions

Art work for KTH and School of Architecture

To be completed 2015. New art work for for KTH campus entrance (Royal Institute of Technology) and School of Architecture (New building Tham & Videgård www.tvark.se), Stockholm. Produced by The Swedish National Public Art Council.

​Click to read more. More text soon.

Commission. Temporary urban research lab

October 1 - December 31 2012. New commission. Using the old Post Office building at Nybrogatan 53, Stockholm. Produced by Mobile Art Production (www.mobileartproduction.se).

​Click to read more. More text soon.

Silver Screen

2011. Competition proposal for ECOSOC chamber, UN building New York

The United Nations (UN) building in New York was designed by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer.  Completed in 1953, the building’s large planes of glass communicated openness and clarity, which could be fittingly extended to the task of those working in the United Nations and towards the peace process. 

As one of four candidates, I was asked to work on a proposal for the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) chamber, and come up with an idea for replacing a large curtain that was hung to block sight of the delegates while they are inside of the large presentation space, from the view of the East River, as a security function.  My proposal made a connection between the peace process that is dependent on time, growing wisdom, and constant motion, with a solution that poetically invoked this process.  Instead of thinking in terms of a static, mostly decorative solution, I wanted to address time and distance as elements necessary in understanding our human condition, along with light as a constant reminder of what lay just outside of the chamber—the rest of the world.

My proposal for the ECOSOC chamber was based on watching a Polaroid photograph slowly develop.  But the “image” in my proposal would gradually appear over the course of 15 to 20 years. Instead of using a photographic process, I proposed to create a “screen” woven from a combination of silver fiber, and real silver thread.  I devised a way to use silver and its natural oxidization property as it comes into contact with air. In this oxidizing process, silver changes from “white” into “black” as it tarnishes, and depending on the amount of sulfur in the air, this process takes between 15-20 years.

The image that would “develop” on the screen over years, would be an image that was taken in the present - a view of the East River and Brooklyn from the viewpoint of the delegates in the chamber. To put it another way, or more poetically, the image of today would be viewed as part of the past.  It would be like the light seen from a distant star - when the light finally reached our sight, it tells us of an existence that has already passed.  The screen would start out as a purely silver surface, reflecting light into the chamber and suggesting that light is pushing through the screen from the outside, forming the image.  It takes time and distance to see our own time, and when we finally can understand it, it will have become a part of history.

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Promenade

2006. Single channel & splitscreen installation. Video. Black and white. Silent. Duration 58:15 min (continuous loop). Projection dimensions 5 x 2,81 meters & 10 x 2,81 meters.

The work was produced as site specific single channel installation in conjuction with a group show at Museum Calle Alcala 31 in Madrid and the work is now part of collection Consejeria de Cultura of the Comunidad de Madrid. The work also exist in a spit screen installation version.

The film produced for the exhibition uses the old bank space at Calle Alcala which today host an art museum as the location for the film and make a 5 minute and 15 second slow circle around the main hall in the space.

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Memory

1999. Pavillion 4 x 4 x 4 meter, with wall text and c-print.

The work Memory is a 4x4x4 meter pavilion that was build for a summer exhibition in 1999 in Wanås sculpture park  in south of Sweden. The house is modeled after a house on Sicily. On the left wall inside the pavilion a 50x50 image of the original house from sicily were place. On the wall opposite from the image a 50x50 cm text plate were placed with the following text:

Last summer I walked past a little house. The house lay apart, slant below from where I came walking. In the light from the doorway I saw two men masturbating. They were standing in the middle of the room with their backs to each other.

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Non video works

Act 1, Scene 1

More information soon.

School Corridor, 1986

2010. Kinetic sculpture. Aluminium, steel, LED lamps, motor. Dimensions 135 x ø92.5cm

This work is something between a sculpture and a mechanical film. I’ve constructed a series of small, three-dimensional “film frames” creating a horizontal wheel, recalling a film reel. When the wheel rotates, the rooms are fed forward like a film in a projector, creating an animation. The rooms are constructed with imperfections and scratches so that the feeling of early animation mechanisms and early cinema comes to mind.

In the work I’m addressing an idea of how memories and film-animations have a connection to each other by the way they are similarly constructed. To be able to create an animation and an illuminated frame—or in this case a room—it’s necessary to always have a dark interval before the next frame/room. The illuminated image is then imprinted on the retina and is linked by the eye's memory to the ensuing room, creating a continued movement.

The work is produced with the help from Konstnärsnämnden - the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.

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View From a Street

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The First Minute of the Rest of a Movie

2005. Collaborative work with Jan Mancuska for Bonner Kunstverein and Kunsthalle St Gallen. 1 cinema installation, 2 text/film screens 4 x 3 meters and 1 shadow back projection 4 x 3 meters.

​Click to read more.That language can generate images and, vice versa, images language and speech is sufficiently well known. In the exhibition by Jonas Dahlberg (*1970) and Ján Mancuska (*1972), two artists meet, who – the different their work is – both place processes of understanding as subject matter in the core of their practice.Understanding is always dependent on the point of view that is assumed. While Jonas Dahlberg explores the viewer’s standpoint and its fragility in space with his filmic images, Ján Mancuska deconstructs conceptual understanding, i.e. language, in space. Language and space are essential parameters that are basic to our understanding of the world. Language, image and space enter a bond to break down the processes of understanding and make them available for spatial experience.In the Bonner Kunstverein, Dahlberg and Mancuska develop an exhibition dispositive that specifies the location of the visitor, his perception of the space he occupies and how it is to be understood in a labyrinthine system. The assumably stable ground beneath our feet and the conferring of associative meanings become physically tangible in their factual instability.The exhibition is not a groupshow in a traditional sense. Jonas Dahlberg and Ján Mancuska are invited to undertake an artistic dialogue and develop an experimental field within which their body of works literally coincide. The aim of any group show is not only to display art in reference to specific conceptual and thematic topics, but to set up an intellectual and artistic dialogue. The latter is the starting point of the collaborative approach of Dahlberg and Mancuska. This exhibition is the first of a series of dialogical shows which takes place at the Bonner Kunstverein and which aims to question and search for different modes of collaborations.The institution’s aim is not only to set up a platform for art and mediate it to a public, but also to foster possibilities for artists to develop and think into their practices in modes they otherwise could not.With his installation “A Cup” Ján Mancuska was represented at Czech-Slovakian Pavilion ("Model of World") at the Venice Biennale 2005. His mostly sculptural works concretize cognition and language, which are otherwise immaterial. Mancuska plays off space, in contrast to many other conceptual approaches that are occupied with assigning meaning. Definitional thinking takes on the spatial form of a sculpturally modulated vocabulary, making cognitive processes physically tangible. What is striking is the "economy" of the means - particularly since the artist’s somewhat laconic approach to meaningful questions of fundamental processes of understanding also boasts an immanently subtle humor.While Mancuska’s work is not comprehensible until the visitor walks around the room and understanding is itself deconstructed in space, Jonas Dahlberg’s video installations transport the viewer to an insecure state of disorientation. The perception of his own location is destabilized in slow camera swings through deserted cities or houses. Dahlberg constructs scale-model houses that he then films, often playing off cinematographic takes, and thereby developing projected illusionistic and alienating spaces. Physical and psychological instability is conferred on the viewer. Irritated by his own perceptual input of where he is, the viewer will end up at times weightless, at times dizzy. The concept of the uncanny (unheimlich or non-homey), which Freud defined as the collapse of our familiar, at-home feeling, is a characteristic of Dalhberg’s work and inquires into the position of the “self”, of one’s own viewing locale.

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Invisible Cities Location Studies

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Safe Zones No. 1

1996 - 2003. Diptych. Framed offset print 180 x 90 cm and framed c-prints 180 x 90 cm.

Safe Zones no 1 is a diptych of  two 180 x 90 cm frames . The left frame shows three night time images of views inside an apartment where someone has rifles on the wall. The right frame shows a plan drawing with two apartments and a text. The plan drawing shows all possible sight lines between these two apartments and the text is as follows:

In 1995, just after I was settled in a new apartment, I was standing at the window when I noticed that a neighbour on the opposite side of the street had guns on the walls.

I got a lot of ideas, some of them quite silly, and I started to photograph his apartment. I thought that if I were to be shot dead, the police would find the photos and catch the killer. Anyway, with the photos as raw material I then began to reconstruct his apartment and made a drawing, including the parts that were not visible from my view.

A few weeks later I rearranged the furniture to the zones which he wouldn't be able to see from his windows. I also decided to live my life exclusively in these safe zones whenever I was at home, which certainly meant that some of the everyday life situations suddenly got rather complicated. However, from his point of view my apartment now was completely empty.

I never met my neighbour or entered his home, and one day when I came back from a trip his apartment was empty.

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Exhibition archive

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2012

• 10 Thesis of Architecture, Vladivostok, September 10 - September 16

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• 40mcube, Rennes, April 1 - April 30

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• Art Unlimited, Art Basel, Switzerland, June 15 - June 19

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• Prospect II, New Orleans, October 22 - January 29 2012

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• Architecture De Film, Centre Pompidou, Paris

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• The Infinite Starburst of Your Cold Dark Eyes, PKM Gallery, Seul, January 14 - February 26

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• Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (Solo Exhibition), February 06 - March 13

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• Mediations Biennale, Poznan, September 10 - Oktober 30

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• 51st October Salong, Belgrade, October 8 - November 21

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• La Disparition, New Galerie, Paris, September 11 - November 15

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• Moderna Utstallningen, Stockholm, October 2 - January 9 2011

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• The Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Lisboa, October 15 - November 21

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• Le Palais Des Ombres, Dijon, July 9 - September 12

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• Architectures De Film, Centre Pompidou, Paris, January 5

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• Still/Moving, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, July 26 - April 26 2011

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• Play List, Moderna Museet c/o Jönköpings Länsmuseum, Sweden, September 18 - January 9 2011

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• Spår, Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden, December 18 - May 22 2011

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• Three. The triptych in Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, February 7 - June 14

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• Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming, Ludwik Grohman Villa, Lodz, September 5 - October 4

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• Multiple city, Filmmusem München, Germany, February 12 - February 15

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• Anamnesis and Extrapolation, PKM Gallery, Beijing, March 14 - April 26

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• Juana de Aizpuru,  Madrid (Solo Exhibition), March 12 - April 19

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• Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (Solo Exhibition), May 14 - June 28

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• The Grand Illusion, National Concert Hall, Taipei, January 17 - May 5

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• The Eventual, Futura Gallery, Prague, May 15 - August 9

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• On the beaten path, Espace Georges Brassens, Talant, May 15 - June 14

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• Pula film festival, Pula, July 18 - July 25

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• Think about death, Korjamoo Gallery, Helsinki (Solo Exhibition)

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2008

2007

• PKM Gallery, Seoul (Solo Exhibition), November 28 - December 31

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• Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, January 17 - February 25

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• Artsonje Center, Seoul, December 4 - April 1 2007

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• Dreamlands burn, Kunshalle Budapest, Hungary, December 7 - February 25 2007

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• Ideal City – Invisible City, Zamosc Poland, June17 /Potsdam Germany, September 8

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• Inner Space, Calle Alcala 31, Madrid, June 6 - August 27

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• 2006 Taipei Biennal, Taiwan, November 4 - February 25 2007

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• Konsthallen Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla (Solo Exhibition), March 25 - May 21

   

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• Neue Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Switzerland (Solo Exhibition with Jan Mancuska), April 4 - May 28

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• The Urban Condition, Museum de Paviljoens, Almere, April 1- October 4

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• The Moderna Exhibition, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Sweden, February 18 - May 7

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• Prospective Sites, Vienna

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• Contradicting Architecture , Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, June 16 - July 23

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• Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (Solo Exhibition with Jan Mancuska), September 30 - November 27

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• Invisible Cities, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Sweden (Solo Exhibition), October 22 - December 30

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• Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel, June 4 - September 3

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• Collège de Dornes Gallery in tandem with FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (Solo Exhibition), January 19 - April 8

   

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• Art Unlimited, Art Basel, Switzerland, June 15 - June 20

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• Interior View, FRI ART, Fribourg, July 2 - September 4

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• Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, August 3 - August 13

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• In-formation, Gallery Jan Koniarek, Trnava, September 8 - October 30

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• Le Génie du lieu, FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, June 18 - September 26

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• The Edstrand Foundation Price Winners 2004, Malmö Konsthall, December 8 - February 20 2005

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• The 26th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (National Representative), September 25 - December 19

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• Busan Biennale, Busan, Korea, January 19 - April 8

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• Interior View, Firstsite, Colchester

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• Juana de Aizpuru,  Madrid (Solo Exhibition), Mars 11 - April 16

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• Somewhere, Elsewhere, Nowhere, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, October 16 - December 5

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• Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Germany (Solo Exhibition), March 6 - April 17

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• Biennale di Venezia - Delays and Revolutions, Palazzo Belmonte Riso, Palermo, September 13 - October 30

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• Momentum 04, Festival of Contemporary Art, Moss, June 27 - September 5

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• Firewall, Ausstellungshalle Zeitgenössische Kunst, Münster, June 27 - September 5

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• Dwellan - Lingering Images, Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen, November 5 - June 12 2005

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• Shaping the imagination, De Zonnehof centrum voor Moderne Kunst, Amersfoort, April

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• Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (Solo Exhibition), August 26 - October 2

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• Delays and Revolutions, 50th Biennale di Venezia, Italian Pavilion, June 15 - November 2

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• Art Focus 4, International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, December 4 - January 3

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• Centre pour l'image contemporaine, Geneva (Solo Exhibition), September 3 - October 19

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• 1:1 x Time - Quantities, Proportions, Perspectives, Frac Bourgogne, Dijon, October 25 - December 20

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• De bortbjudna, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, June 28 - September 7

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• Art Unlimited, Art Basel, Switzerland, June 18 - June 23

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• Magazzino d'Arte Moderna, Rome (Solo Exhibition), June 25 - October 10

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• Safe Zones No. 8, Restaurant Riche, Stockholm, Permanent Installation

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• Trafo Gallery, Budapest, January 19 - April 8

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• Artissima 10, Galerie Nordenhake, Turin, November 6 - November 9

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• Stockholm Art Fair, Galerie Nordenhake, Sweden, Mars 6 - Mars 9

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• Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany (Solo Exhibition), November 29 - February 1 2004

   

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• Manifesta 4, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Frankfurt, May 25 - August 25

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• The 27th Pontevedra Biennial, Spain, June

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• IASPIS Gallery, Stockholm (Solo Exhibition), January 19 - April 8

   

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• Centre d'Edition Contemporaine, Geneva

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• Gallery Giò Marconi, Milan, March 15 - April 27

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• Greyscale/CMYK, Tramway, Glasgow, August 30 - October 20

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• Waygood Gallery, Newcastle (Solo Exhibition), June 28 - September 7

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• Restaurant George at Centre Pompidou, Paris

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• Through a Sequence of Space, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, June 1 - July 27

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• CTRL SPACE, ZKM - Zentrum für Kunst und Mediatechnologie, Karlsruhe, October 13 - February 24 2002

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• Milch Gallery, London (Solo Exhibition), January 19 - April 8

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• Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (Solo Exhibition), February 24 - March 25

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• Projects for a Revolution, Mois de la Photo a Montreal, September

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• New Contemporaries, Wanås Foundation, Knislinge, May 20 - October 15

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• Art Volume at the Venice Biennale, Venice, June 15 - November 2

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• Anteprima Bovisa. Milano Europa 2000, Triennale and PAC, Milano

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• On Location, Forsbacka bruk, Gävle, June

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• B I G Torino, the Biennial of Emerging Artist, Torino, April 7 - April 17

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• Rum i staden, Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla, June

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• MA show, Malmö Art Academy, PEEP Galley, Malmö (Solo Exhibition)

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• Art Volume, Stockholm

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