2015
Single channel installation
HD video
black and white
sound
26:55 min (continuous loop)
Projection dimension ~ 4 x 3 meters

Jonas Dahlberg’s new exhibition at the gallery constitutes his first such in many years. During this absence from the scale of the white cube he has embarked on and realized a series of large and ambitious projects in the public domain, most notably his winning proposal for the July 22 memorials in Oslo and Utøya, Norway.

While working on ideas and solutions for an expansive landscape, exposed to a wide public and addressing a whole nation’s experience of shock and loss, Dahlberg, in his private time, has returned instead to the local, the close-at-hand, the small-scale and the intimate.

In a group of photographic works Dahlberg captures portraits of common garden birds. In the tradition of many nature photographers and in line with Dahlberg’s own practice, that which appears to be a naturalist scene is actually borne of a constructed environment. Dahlberg attracts the birds in an arranged diorama, with feeder and perch. He sits and waits. Time drags out. Moments of significance occur outside his orchestration.

In the other major new work, Dahlberg presents another form of diorama, but at the scale of magnified microcosm. In the large-format video work Music Box, the viewer follows the camera’s journey though the confined space of a small music box - an object with personal and historical significance for the artist.

The tiny mechanisms of the box take on an industrial character in this expanded scale and recall the austerity of Adolf Lazi’s Neue Sachlichkeit photographs of the 1930’s, and the cinematic visual language of Chaplain’s Modern Times and Lang’s Metropolis. The associations of industrial alienation coexist with the intimacy of the personal object and the proximity of the camera. In another cinematic analogue the music box suggests a kind of Wellesian Rosebud significance that is never resolved. The literary allusion would be Proust’s Madeleine Cake - the intense gaze inside the box leads not to traces of Dahlberg’s own history but instead to associative moments in the history of industrialism and cinema.

In both bodies of work, time respectively slows down and comes to a halt. The frozen scenography of the diorama is both methodology and story-telling device. Dahlberg fictionalises reality and constructs a framework on which cinema and architecture are connected in their narrative potential, each built on the memory of accumulated sequences.

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

Were Jonas Dahlberg a film director, his camera work might be described as front and center or a little bit square—but that’s OK, because his work is otherwise flush with mystifying dramas. In his earlier three-screen video Three Rooms, 2008, domestic interiors simply melt into nothing. There’s no trace of special effects, you can’t believe your eyes, and then it’s over—chests, chairs, beds, all gone. You shake your head, you move on. Dahlberg doesn’t need to move the camera around; he positions you to experience his version of the Kübler-Ross model of five stages of grief, running from denial to acceptance.

Dahlberg’s best work reminds me of what can be read as another revision of Kübler-Ross’s sequence, J. G. Ballard’s 1981 short story “The Autobiography of J. G. B.” A man wakes one morning to find his town of Shepperton inexplicably deserted. “Nothing in this peaceful suburb was out of place, except for its missing tenants.” Gradually, he realizes that everyone—as in everyone—has gone missing. Also missing is any upshot to the story; in its place, Ballard provides the mild-mannered acquiescence of the lone character, who grows content having become the last person on earth, while Shepperton turns into “an extraordinary aviary, filled with birds of every species.” Dahlberg’s new exhibition, “View Through a Park,” could be the set for a transatlantic version of Ballard’s fancied autobiography. He has taken New York’s Gramercy Park as his location, showing it after sunset in a video, View Through a Park, 2009, and a suite of photographs, View from a Street, 2009. Shot from a model, not from life, the photographs depict the buildings that surround the park. The film begins in an apartment in one of these buildings—appointed in the way that makes World of Interiors call about doing a feature—and from there proceeds out the window at a slow crawl. On the other side of the park, the camera enters through another window to discover an apartment not precisely the twin of the one from whence it has come, but close enough to call it so. And then it’s out the window, heading back. Dahlberg’s obsession with spying back and forth between apartments has its own backstory in his earlier work Safe Zones no. 1, 1996–2003. Dahlberg once lived in an apartment facing another whose tenant prominently displayed trophy rifles; this triggered enough paranoia for Dahlberg to arrange the furniture in his apartment so that from the would-be assassin’s POV, it would appear that his apartment was abandoned. Photographs and diagrams document Dahlberg’s manic solution for self-survival.

As an account of Dahlberg’s video, Vivian Mercier’s 1956 review of Waiting for Godot, “nothing happens, twice,” can’t be beat. The film, a single, exceptionally long tracking shot, carries you from one apartment to its twin, faithfully withholding any conclusion through a nightmarish sameness. The single emotion it expresses, while constantly teetering on the brink of wide-eyed madness, is mild-mannered serenity. Gramercy Park has been the last privately held park in Manhattan for decades. A statue of Edwin Booth, the feted nineteenth century Shakespearean actor and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, serves as the park’s centerpiece. As an example of landscape architecture, the park is fully anesthetized and ringed by brownstones as solidly sedate as the grounds they face. Ready-made, it is Dahlberg’s perfect conceit: a secular Eden where private park equals private world fully in denial of the real world just beyond. In Dahlberg’s portrayal, it is a psychological landscape that you might like to visit, but . . . View Through a Park is a loopy black comedy caught up in its own tautology that unexpectedly baits your emotions; its strength is that its complacency is so well bred, it makes you want to scream.

2008
Three channel installation
HD video
Black and white
Silent
Duration 26:58 min (continuous loop)
Dimensions ~ 50 inch LCD monitors

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 de- cay, 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.

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.

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

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 (under- stand ‘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.

1. Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?, Bulletin de la Société francaise de philosophie, no 3, July-September 1969, reproduced in Dits et Ecrits, vol.1, Quarto, Gallimard, Paris, 1994

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

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 (Vertical Sliding / Horizontal 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 starring 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 apartments 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.

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

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 (Vertical Sliding / Horizontal 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 starring 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 apartments 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.

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

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 go- ing 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.

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

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

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.