PRESS RELEASE

Lars Arrhenius & Daniel Westlund: The Exquisite Corpse Orchestra

July 9 – September 4, 2010

This summer, ftc. is very pleased to present Swedish artists Lars Arrhenius and Daniel Westlund, with their video installations The Exquisite Corpse Orchestra and The Big Store (their previous animated film from 2008). Arrhenius and Westlund have been working together on film projects since 2007.

In The Exquisite Corpse Orchestra, a four-channel video installation, which will be shown in the back half of the gallery, we see five body parts playing four different musical instruments. What at first appears to be very bizarre is also simultaneously fascinating, due to the way the ensemble is brought together so matter-of-factly. The ultimate result of this humoresque, however, is the music itself. The individual, fragmented body parts become an orchestra, which plays a tango that literally makes them clink. “Exquisite Corpse” is also the name of a game invented by the Surrealists, in which players take turns drawing a complete human figure piece by piece: one starts with the head, the next one adds the neck, and so on. Despite the average quality of the tango and the way the playing of the ensemble eventually breaks down, the work is captivating, especially thanks to the cheerful, self-satisfied air of the players.

The second video, The Big Store (2008), is entirely in black-and-white. It is an abstract, reduced treatment of the fatal knife attack made on the Swedish foreign secretary, Anna Lindh, in 2003. The film shows the few minutes that preceded the deed, and then the actual assault, which occurred in a large department store. Skeletal characters move through the familiar shopping setting, which, however, has been divested of its wares, just as the figures are missing the clothing that protects them. People are engaged in their everyday activities, but the x-ray effect and the empty department store create a disturbing feeling. Only the escalators, clothing racks, and architecture form something of an orientation point. Even the soundtrack does not really reproduce speech per se, but is more like a sound painting. The attack at the end of the video suddenly destroys the cheerful and relaxed atmosphere in an extreme way. We are back in the real world again.

Lars Arrhenius (1966) and Daniel Westlund (1969) were students together at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm between 1989 and 1994. The Big Store received the award for the “best foreign animation” at the Independent Filmfestival in Rome in 2008. Their series Showtajm is currently featured on children’s television in Sweden.

Lars Arrhenius and Daniel Westlund live and work in Stockholm, Sweden.