PRESS RELEASE



Peder Jansson: Enshrinements, Gallery Rostrum, Malmö, Sweden, 231102 - 151202.

Occasionally, I claim that "it takes a particular lot to make me affected and/or interested in anything". Whatever one would like to call this matter, the concept 'selective' is merely the given name of this fastidiousness of mine. Naturally, I stand by what I claim in the great majority of cases, except for one occurrence that has followed me through the years: the sight of remains of children's presence in the street. I think of such things as scattered clothes and toys, for instance, a baby's comforter, shoe or mitten. It is the human presence connected through objects that in principle without exception brings me to a standstill, if just for a moment only. Regardless if it is my past that knocks me on my shoulder or not at the appearance of such a scenery, my (and probably several others') emotional defence is temporarily weakened, this to such extent that I decided to start to collect 'humans relics' - lost ones as well as those thrown away, voluntarily left behind or elaborately set out. What definitely made the starting-shot of the this matter, was when I found a pair of intensely orange-coloured children's mittens lay neatly placed on the top of a heap of discarded glass just outside of a glass foundry. Regardless if the mittens had been placed there on purpose or not, the image was powerful enough to make an exhibition round this subject to take form.

Literally, Enshrinements mean 'preservation (as a relic)'. The term is mostly used within psychology when it comes to parents' reificating mourning, i.e. a psychological recuperation through a fixation of a deceased child's personal belongings. This may concern physical objects such as, for instance, a lock of hair or a deciduous tooth or other things like a Christening Spoon, comforter or a stuffed animal. The palpable emotional qualities that in most cases are present in objects anchored to children is not solely due to the design, but is also, to a great extent, due to adults' perceptive nostalgia - to re-experience childhood through an object's link to an important personal event. However, the conception of being able to animate an artifact is not a particularly new device, but a globally admitted and in most cases, a religious comprehension. Within, for instance, voodoo ('spirit') and psychometrics ('soul-measuring'), maybe the most well-known, but different conceptions prevail of how any kind of personal artifact or physical object could be used to affect and/or tell something about its owner.

The objects that I have found and photographed are thus in a state of ambiguity when it comes to a child's protests (for instance, a toy that has been thrown away on purpose to attract attention) or a feeling of discomfort when it comes to a presumed crime (for instance, a lost shoe's hint of that a child has been kidnapped). However, it is not made clear of why this kind of objects lay in certain places and what the implication of this matter is. One could thus draw attention to the fact that the phenomenon is similarly spread in bigger cities, and that it, suggestively, might have something to do with contemporary urban lifestyles.

A lot of times, it has, to say the least, been arduous to photograph the objects that I have found interesting, particularly bearing difficulty of access and poor lighting conditions in mind. I have thus considered it interesting to transfer this "site-variegation" spatially when it comes to the photographs' positions in the gallery space - especially for breaking with the customary barrenness (standard formatted photographs suspended on the wall along a horizontal line) that still prevails to a large extent within the exhibition conventions of photography. One possibility to try to break new ground for photography is to choose to exhibit at the liberal artist-run galleries and another is, for instance, to revalue the potentials of the photograph's external shape and give it a meaning equivalent to the motif itself.


Peder Jansson, Berlin, September, 2002



The exhibition consists of photographs, installations and sound work. The photographs were shot in Bergen, Berlin, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Kökar/Åland. For further information on the exhibition, click here.