Near to the 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 works by artists from different generations that trace sensorial, non-verbal, spiritual or otherwise invisible but vividly sensed layers of experience. The “wild heart” referred to in the exhibition title alludes to the essential force of life that moves through the world, animating both it and us on its way. In the exhibition, this vital energy is at times encountered as desire, magic, sexuality, imagination, ecstacy, nature, or the mystical divine. Central to many of the artworks is the dissolution of imagined boundaries; between the I and the other, the body and the world, or between inner and outer landscapes and experiences.

The different artistic expressions and media—painting, textile, sculpture, photography, collage and video—invite to an understanding of the world and the human as part of a continuous process of transformation and becoming. Many of the artworks visualize resonances and correspondences, in which the viewer’s presence and imaginative gaze is implicated as an active co-creator of a living and spirited world.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Clarice Lispector’s novel of the same name (Perto do coraçao selvagem, 1943)— a wildly poetic piece of writing in which the human mind and body are interwoven with the animalistic force of life and its mysteriously elusive inner being. Lispector is often mentioned as an example of “écriture feminine” (Hélène Cixous, 1975) in which embodied experience and the subconscious are given shape in the text as a way to contest a rationalistic world order. She in turn borrowed the phrase “near to the wild heart” from a passage in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), another author famous for portraying inner psychological reality through changeable streams of consiousness and the transgression of boundaries.

At Lunds konsthall the phrase shapeshifts once again, becomes exhibition title, and transforms the art gallery into another body to temporarily house its wildly beating heart.
Image: Özlem Altın, Untitled (tree inside), 2017

Curator: Lisa Rosendahl