Madge Private View

Madge is an exhibition of work made since the artists first met in June of this year. They were installing an exhibition of sound and video works in the machine house of an old iron mine in Sweden. The exhibition, Maj, was inspired by the writing of Maj Hirdman and the mine itself. This exhibition, Madge, is inspired by conversations had and relationships formed whilst living and working in the former mining town and ideas that have developed since then.

Viktor Landström (Sweden) has collaborated with Sebastian Wahlforss (Sweden) to make the poster work Finding The One, Being The One, a structured and modified cut-up that takes the form of a dialogue. It is composed of image and text fragments taken from various sources such as social media platforms, chat forums and self-help blogs. The dialogue is a mirror of opposites, of domination and submission, narcissism and self- hatred. The One needing the other in a mutual project of self-realization. The piece was originally published earlier in 2018, in conjunction with the Swedish film journal Filmögon.

Ziad Nagy (USA) uses found material to create interventions that are broadly existential: identity, life, death, and time. He might present a crying house or he might make a smoking ice cream.

Kirsten Bertelsen (Denmark) has been researching shame: according to neuroscientists, shame is a line of communicating nerve cells running from the primal part of the brain to the guts and the stomach. The line of communication is malleable. Shame is trained. The more shame the more efficient the communication and the easier it is for the effect to arise. The complex and universal feeling is both subjective and social. The resulting audio work is an exploration of shame using her own voice.

Hannah Dargavel-Leafe (UK) has created a new piece based on a hand-drawn map giving directions to a beach by the lake in Sweden. We couldn’t read the map, but we did get to our destination.

Aukse Jonauskyte (Lithuania) has made a new sound work inspired by occupational hazards caused by mining. Aukse uses the spoken voice as an omniscient narrator travelling through a dreamscape that sympathises with parts of affected workers bodies. As well as (e)motions of a mountain, dust and the iron ore. Accompanying sounds are manipulated recordings of bodily actions voiced via music instruments. ​