Mirror’s Edge
Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden
What in the world might bring you to a small town an hour’s flight north of Stockholm, where the only things to look forward to are sub-polar darkness, depressed university students, militant vegans who blow up hot dog stands, and pensioned-off miners? There might be two reasons: firstly, Umeå has a nice museum; secondly, that Okwui Enwezor curated a show of 30 international artists at the northern tip of the northern hemisphere. Dismiss the thought that he only did it as a rehearsal for his job as director of Documenta 2002 - he was invited to Umeå well before he accepted that position.
Bearing all of the above in mind, it somehow didn’t seem surprising that a UFO was hovering above the museum. At second glance, it turned out to be Sophie Tottie’s shimmering brown billboard construction Kyctic Voyager III (1999). A dubby bassline emanated from the museum entrance, which triggered the idea of a George Clintonesque mothership landing to collect souls from a cultural Diaspora. Inside, the bass mingled with a loud cheeping - crickets giving a concert. Amplified by a professional sound system, these not exactly Arctic creatures appeared to be trying to out-sing each other. Henrik Håkansson’s Monsters of Rock (1997) were positive heroes in a set up that seemed to anticipate the overall atmosphere of the show: a ridiculing of white-boy, rock-star posing, short-circuited with an amplified love for the natural wonders of the world.
The bassline accompanying the chirping was Mobile Stealth Unit (1999) by Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand (a.k.a. Soundlab), a Trinidadian sound system built onto a bicycle covered in gadgets that any kids reclaiming the street might dream of. Another version of the UFO appeared behind it on the wall, along with strange images of head-scarved women visible on its surface. What does it all mean? Grannies in space? Sophie Tottie’s Kyctic Voyager IV (1999) might look spacey, but it also supposedly refers to the shape of the circular Placa de Mayo in Santiago in Chile were mothers in white head scarves demonstrated and mourned the loss of their sons and daughters abducted by the Pinochet regime. While the Soundlab piece, with all its sympathetic euphoria for misused high-tech, wears its street culture references on its sleeve, Tottie lets her allusions to the ‘disappeared’ disappear behind a great looking extraterrestrial hermeticism.
The show’s title ‘Mirror’s Edge’ refers to Foucault’s analysis of Velàzquez’ painting Las Meninas (1656) in which the painter looks back at the viewer, but seemingly also at the royal couple (who we see mirrored in the back of the room), thus confusing hierarchies and levels of representation. Enwezor does not tie into the game of representing ‘marginalised positions’ for the sake of selling indulgences to saturated white souls. Instead, a global import/export map of artistic languages is laid out and filled in, establishing a sense of self-explanatory kinship along the way.
Bodys Isek Kingelez’ architectural model Hommage à Jean Nouvel (1999) is made of cheap stationary and looks as if a Miami mogul had asked Jean Nouvel to create a new Hong Kong. It seems perfectly at home with Franz Ackermann’s small ‘Mental Maps’ (1998-99), which are much more effectual than the inflated wall pieces he has presented elsewhere: deliriously psychedelic watercolours of airport gangways that turn into grey caterpillars, and Beirut rises from the ashes like a spaceship.
These kaleidoscopic works (along with those of Thomas Hirschhorn, Carlos Garaicoa or Pascale Marthine Tayou) seem to opt, like Alice, for what lies behind the mirror’s edge. Another strand in the show deals with the dead angles that lie between infinite reflections, like those of Ceal Floyer or Liisa Roberts. Francis Alÿs was represented with Cantos Patrioticos (Version Mariachis) (1998-99), a video of Mariachi musicians playing a song about a snake biting its tail, or trying to stop cars in the heavy Mexico City traffic for a paid serenade; suddenly the music stops, the image freezes, and, on the other side of the room, a video-projection of a group of people playing musical chairs starts up.
This cycle of economic struggle - embodied by the Mariachis, who still make music despite working in conditions that are either poorly paid or deaf to their creativity - reflects the concerns of ‘Mirror’s Edge’ more effectively than the catalogue’s rhetoric about the gaze or egos. Even though artists seem to have about as much power over political and economic global torrents as musicians have over traffic, they shouldn’t stop trying to effect change.
Jorg Heiser
