Åsa Cederqvist
(b.1975) received her MFA at Konstfack in 2000. Her work has a performative foundation and is expressed through video, sculpture, installation and performative add-ons, so called extensions, as well as in an interface incorporating all these elements.
We are impoverishing the earth, and we don’t feel good about the inconceivable mistakes that are made daily in the zeal of efficiencies and measurability. We are expected to act rationally when we are instinctively driven animals, still communicating through gut feel. With my work I want to reach beyond this efficiency trap. I want to wake up sleeping senses, call it intuition, spirituality or presence, that would connect us beyond the rational and anthropocentric world we now live in. We are nature after all.
Åsa Cederqvist work with film, installation, sculpture and performance, in an interface between fiction - documentation, haptic - conceptual, ambigious - rational. Åsa continue to build works with a specific personal mythology from the interest in therapeutical methods, behavioural science and collaborative processes. Her work moves between documentary field studies, staged live performances, physical interaction, which all aim to push the expectations of formats, aestetical hierarchies and modes of expression.
Through the act of playing, and study of knowledge production, personal growth, behavioral science and the use of expectations and suspense, my on-going practice if set to manifest the importance of physical understanding and a non-rational and multi-layered communication. Inherent lies the investigation of everyday magic, meaning making, spatial drama and co-creative processes.
For the past five years, Åsa’s artistic practice has focused on the conditions and opportunities of the act of playing, and how to engage in uncontrolled situations, new materials and approaches. A result from this is the work Mama Dada Gaga which portrays three generations of women in a multi-disciplinary work, and also the exhibition Some Kind of Metabolism at Katrineholms Konsthall in 2018.
Åsa Cederqvist has a background as a director of commercials and music videos (2004–), as an artistic director in multiple art educational projects as well as senior lecturer in art at Textil, Konstfack (2010–2020). In 2016-17 she received the IASPIS residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She was one of the participating artists at the MOMENTUM 10 biennale in Norway 2019 and in Borås Art Biennale 2021.
works:
WHAT: Presentation at Open Studios at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, March 2, 2017 | MEDIUM: a one-day durational performance setting compromised by mixed media, specially invited guests and improvisation with the audience.
The Potential Space is an atmosphere, a setting, a situation of possibilities. I found the expression ”potential space” when stated by the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He says: "Playing takes place in the potential space between the baby and the motherfigure....[T]he initiation of playing is associated with the life experience of the baby who has come to trust the mother figure". I use Winnicott's term for a sense of the inviting and safe interpersonal field in which one can be spontaneously playful while at the same time connected to others, and this is what I also claim to do with this model.
In various settings and frame works I invite the audience to take part and become immersed by and interacted with through the space and the ongoing work and/or performances. The idea is to post something that I, nor the spectator, need any explanation or preknowledge about, you don’t need to make any judgements of what you experience. You may just left to “be”.
Invited collaborators: Ziúr, Cred, Lyra Pramuk (former Ande), Bimsala, Olleesch & Liza
AR development by Fredrik Holmgren/ Immerence | The spirit’s voice was written and recorded by Åsa Cederqvist | Sounds and music from freesound.org by Felix Blume, Phonos UPF, licensed under Creative Commons
In this work you’ll meet a drop of water. Is it the first or is it the last? The Essence aim to wake up sleeping senses – call it intuition, spirituality or presence – that connect us beyond the rational and the anthropocentric world we live in. It’s said that water would be nature’s medium for communicating with humanity. Now we’ve reached a point in time when we must start listening.
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