Close to the wild heart
Artists: Özlem Altın, Kinga Bartis, Mary Beth Edelson, Damla Kilickiran, Jochen Lempert, Antje Majewski / Issa Samb / Olivier Guesselé-Garai, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Max Walter Svanberg, Gudrun Åhlberg.
The exhibition brings together artists from different generations who in their works trace sensory, non-verbal, spiritual or otherwise hidden but perceptibly present layers of experience. The "wild heart" in the exhibition title alludes to the life force that moves through the world and animates both it and us. In the works of art, this vital energy is expressed in different ways; embodied as desire, magic, sexuality, fantasy, ecstasy, nature or spiritual mystery. Common to many of the works is the experience of dissolved boundaries—between the self and the other, between the body and the world, or between inner and outer landscapes and experiences.
Through various materials and artistic expressions—painting, textile, sculpture, photography, collage and video—the exhibition invites to an understanding of man and the world as being in constant change and becoming. Several of the works visualize different forms of resonance and relationality, where the viewer's gaze and presence are co-creators of a sensual and soulful world.
The exhibition title is borrowed from the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector's novel of the same name (Perto do coraçao selvagem, 1943) — a wildly pounding poetic text in which the human body and consciousness are woven together with the animal force of life and mysteriously intangible essences. Lispector is often referred to as an example of "écriture féminine" (Hélène Cixous, 1975), where bodily experiences and the unconscious are written out as a way of challenging a rationalistic world order. Lispector in turn borrowed the phrase "close to the wild heart" from a passage in James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), also a body of writing known for its ability to portray inner psychological reality through shifting streams of consciousness and transgressing boundaries.
At Lund's art gallery, the words of the books change shape once again, become the title of the exhibition and transform the art gallery into yet another temporary body for the wild heart of life to pulse through.
Curator: Lisa Rosendahl