Welcome to the opening on Sunday 1 Dec at 11 am – 5 pm! Free entrence all day. Director Sara Arrhenius presents the grant recipients and opens the exhibition at 1pm.

The Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation awards an annual grant for the support of young Swedish visual artists and artistic work. The Foundation was founded in 1985 by Jeanette Bonnier in memory of her daughter Maria. Bonniers Konsthall’s inaugural exhibition in autumn 2006 presented all previous grant recipients. Since its inception, 70 artists have been awarded grants by the Foundation. Previous grant recipients include Cecilia Edefalk, Karin Mamma Andersson, Jacob Dahlgren and Gunnel Wåhlstrand. The 2012 Grant Recipients were Pauliina Pietilä, Sara Wallgren and Nadja Bournonville.

Guest jury 2013: Stefanie Hessler and Håkan Rehnberg

Josef Bull

Josef Bull creates conceptual sculptures and objects that bring together widely different subjects and phenomena. He is fascinated by the connections that can arise between cultures, periods, and materials, and he continually returns to ideas about relationships between seemingly unrelated objects and themes. His subjects come almost exclusively from web-based environments, and the works often originate from unexpected coincidences that occur while surfing the internet. For Triple Headed Didgeridoo, he has drawn inspiration from YouTube videos featuring “do-it-yourself” instruments. The sculptures/instruments are made from ordinary PVC pipes, painted with hobby paint, and presented on colorful blankets. The individual forms give each didgeridoo its own visual character and unique tone. Josef Bull is interested in the absurd connection that arises between an ancient ceremonial instrument and contemporary plastic drainpipes. A didgeridoo player with whom Josef Bull collaborates will perform on the instrument on a few occasions during the exhibition period.

Explanatory Statement of the Jury: There is an inquisitiveness and humour in Josef Bull’s work that is difficult to resist. The instruments he works with offer a heightened experience to take place between people, as if the air we share carries an artistic community within it. Bull creates batteries out of lemons and other fruit, breathing apparatuses and other mystical objects, and yet his spiritualism is more grounded than not, more a nod to a historical phenomenon translated into artistic experimentation and invented figures.

Olof Inger

Meditations is a series of drawings made with printer ink on paper. The drawings are an ongoing practice and a way for the artist to make his mind and body more present, like a unifying or balancing of the cosmos. The work is executed on standardized printer paper cut to the dimensions 36 x 36 inches, so that nothing more than the movement of the arm is required to perform the meditation. A handmade pen, crafted from empty ink cartridges, is used to maintain a consistently thick line. This is the only rule for the drawings: they must begin and end at the same point. Olof Inger has made around 200 different meditations, each one creating a unique loop.

Explanatory Statement of the Jury: Olof Inger has his very own divining rod, one that places artistic impulse just a single step before the actual execution of an artwork. Any and all effort appears to vanish. ‘Containers’, a collection of shrink-wrapped masses, address the notion of consumerism and monumentally increasing wastage. Deeply anchored in the physical world, they approximate a sort of white noise. His drawings meditating on movement, which begin and end at the same point, create a secure circuit ever convincing in its expressive strength.

Nanna Nordström

Nanna Nordström bases her work on the orientations and centers of gravity of different objects to construct a narrative of balancing acts that are constantly on the verge of collapsing. She explores how meaning is created and operates through the relationships that arise when objects and materials are placed in relation to one another, to a space, or to our bodies. Her works are a process, and it is only at the public moment that the framework is set for what ultimately becomes the piece. Over the past year, Nanna Nordström has been working with text, exploring whether it is possible to relate to words and writing in the same way she relates to materials and objects.

Explanatory Statement of the Jury: Nanna Nordström creates a brand-new visual repertoire of materials, shapes and relationships between objects in her installations, a visual collection dressed in ideas and notions impossible to put into words. Experimenting with the relationship between a textual versus visual language, Nordström works in the middle ground that exists between the two, utilising the untranslatable. By suspending common objects in space, she inspires unique situations and contexts, testing the object’s physicality and identity through newfound constellations.