Saskia Holmkvist
Arnolfini, Bristol, UK
Role Control (2008)
A cold and distant hand governs the fate of the characters in Saskia Holmkvist’s latest videos like an obscure, invisible dictator. The Stockholm-based artist’s narratives feature interrogators, interviewers and mediators, but the sovereign power seems to be hidden elsewhere, diffused across the whole Kafka-esque system itself. Holmkvist’s first solo show in the UK explores the ugly side of political and corporate rhetoric – its power to coerce, convince and corral, its terrifying ability to transmute words into the new reality.
Installed between two large, convex conference tables in a gallery painted a sickly ochre, a freestanding screen displays the videos In Character and Role Control (both 2008). The former is a mini-drama, scripted by the artist and played by three actors, that initially takes the form of a job interview. But all is not as it seems: polite queries (‘no problem in finding your way’) morph into challenges (‘Could you describe a situation you find stressful?’), and then outright interrogation (‘we do this every day, you might as well give up now’). Role Control features the same actors playing a couple and a Svengali-like councillor at a relationship-therapy session. Events take a sinister turn as metaphors of a competing ‘term in office’ ossify into fact, and the personal becomes (quite literally) the political.
System (2001) is a more low-key video, but still rich and bizarre. A peripatetic fly moves across the screen whilst a measured voice recounts three real-life fables concerning mankind’s failed attempts to control complex social and ecological systems. These include: Mao’s advocacy of handclapping to prevent swallows decimating crops, Gaddafi’s accidental expulsion of bakers from Libya, and Australia’s introduction of the Cane Toad to its predator-free shores. Similarly, Eight Martini (2004) reflects on the lunatic fringe of national governance. Here, an abstract Etch A Sketch-like drawing provides a visual key as a narrator tells the story of the CIA’s use of ‘telepathic’ remote viewers to counter the red threat. Like Jon Ronson’s darkly funny book The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), this work exposes the deeply irrational foundation of the US’s obsession with ‘national security’.
If all of these works nod both ways to referential expansiveness and structural neatness, Interview with Saskia Holmkvist (2005) falls unabashedly into the latter category. The video mimics the artist interviews usually plonked in the foyers of public galleries and museums; the added twist is that Holmkvist has hired a media-relations expert to instruct her in how to appear convincing. It’s more than a little reminiscent of Carey Young’s I Am A Revolutionary (2001), which also features an ‘unmasking’ of the conventions of self presentation. Unfortunately, these works say almost nothing beyond the painfully obvious (who is green enough not to think that artists are sometimes liars and charlatans?) – this really is an insult to the audience’s intelligence. During the show’s opening, Holmkvist gave a speech whilst simultaneously being coached by another PR agent; footage of this event is currently being edited into a new video work. I only hope, in its final form, it is a little less navel-gazing, and, like her other works, a bit more generous.
Colin Perry
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