SonAxis
Comissioned artistic intervention within the collections, exhititions, and history of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, 8 May > 6 June, 2021.
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SonAxis was an artistic installation and intervention with the so called “ Missionary exhibition” (Missionsutställningen), at the The Museum of Ethnography. It was also in some ways an intervention within some of the core narratives of the Museum of Ethnography and its intimate relation to the christian missionary movement. But most of all, an intervention with a decolonial here and now in Sweden, summer 2021. The art works within the exhibition are tracking, trapping, slippering, listening, calibrating and negotiating myriad nuances within the blur of desires driving colonizers, ethnographers, and missionaries alike, guided by Christianity, commerce, science, in search of the other and unknown. The project has meant a retracing of their footsteps throughout Northern European modernism, as cultural heritage of constructions of whiteness. The protestant mission heard as movement born out of trauma at home. The trauma of topographic amnesia forced by a cultures and even campaigns hostile to the native musicalities honouring rhythm. The missionary ar involuntary victim of the dark side of the enlightenment, industrialism, and the Christian conversion, the born-agains spawned with fantasies about Africa and Congo as a lost paradise, and the Scandinavians as the heroic Viking reborn as the civilised engineer in the quest for universal civilisation. A mission to exterminate poverty, slavery, as identified through inferior cultural traits such as heathenry and with that allt the vices of infidels — a journey between Heaven and hell. The missionary struggle to make a new art form of christian engineering bear witness to modernism’s civilising canon. A movement of ambiguity and overcompensation, often willfully naive and blind to the inherent racist structures at the core of colonialism, in its ambition to do good. And not least the internal racist structures of moving along the veins of christianity. But in the guise of the MIssionary movement, also a movement at the absolute front line of racial friction, and thus first hand whitnesses to anti colonial struggles. But.. also a movement often led by a deep and heartfelt consern for the fellow man.
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Comissioned artistic intervention within the collections, exhititions, and history of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden, 8 May > 6 June, 2021.
..........................................................
SonAxis was an artistic installation and intervention with the so called “ Missionary exhibition” (Missionsutställningen), at the The Museum of Ethnography. It was also in some ways an intervention within some of the core narratives of the Museum of Ethnography and its intimate relation to the christian missionary movement. But most of all, an intervention with a decolonial here and now in Sweden, summer 2021. The art works within the exhibition are tracking, trapping, slippering, listening, calibrating and negotiating myriad nuances within the blur of desires driving colonizers, ethnographers, and missionaries alike, guided by Christianity, commerce, science, in search of the other and unknown. The project has meant a retracing of their footsteps throughout Northern European modernism, as cultural heritage of constructions of whiteness. The protestant mission heard as movement born out of trauma at home. The trauma of topographic amnesia forced by a cultures and even campaigns hostile to the native musicalities honouring rhythm. The missionary ar involuntary victim of the dark side of the enlightenment, industrialism, and the Christian conversion, the born-agains spawned with fantasies about Africa and Congo as a lost paradise, and the Scandinavians as the heroic Viking reborn as the civilised engineer in the quest for universal civilisation. A mission to exterminate poverty, slavery, as identified through inferior cultural traits such as heathenry and with that allt the vices of infidels — a journey between Heaven and hell. The missionary struggle to make a new art form of christian engineering bear witness to modernism’s civilising canon. A movement of ambiguity and overcompensation, often willfully naive and blind to the inherent racist structures at the core of colonialism, in its ambition to do good. And not least the internal racist structures of moving along the veins of christianity. But in the guise of the MIssionary movement, also a movement at the absolute front line of racial friction, and thus first hand whitnesses to anti colonial struggles. But.. also a movement often led by a deep and heartfelt consern for the fellow man.
SonAxis - A Sundi Mongo Stack, 2121, C-Print
..........................................................
>returns
> artworkings, etc
> info
> index
> news
> cv
> contact