OPENS SOON

Based on her father's escape from the GDR, artist and architect Petra Gipp has created an exhibition in which she examines how escape affects human spatial identity. With the exhibition, she wants to focus on the complexity of the migrations of our time. What happens to the place we carry within us when we are forced to move in time and space? The project wants to reflect on architecture and art, in a political climate that in many ways reflects a past we are once again approaching. What happens when life changes and has to continue in a different way, somewhere else? How are we affected by escape and change?

“Based on information from the archives of the former GDR, Russia and Sweden, I am taking a journey in the footsteps of my father. The tracks lead to places that in turn bear traces of other human destinies, and in this way the personal and the collective are intertwined into a story with many voices and destinies.

“Where the tracks end, the cast enters; wordlessly, with a language and presence that can tell the unspoken. In this exploratory artistic work, I start from plaster and concrete. The casts are on a scale reminiscent of the human body. Here the cast stands in relation to spaces, light and shadow, to sequences and dynamics, to the personal and the collective.

Petra Gipp works in the borderland between architecture and art. The carrier of history and memory of place and space is a starting point in her work and she possesses a strong ability to interact with the surrounding environment. She makes it clear that architecture is a language in itself, and is happy to express herself in innovative dialogue with practitioners of other art forms, as in this exhibition with poet Ann Jäderlund and composer Sole Gipp Ossler.

Petra Gipp (b. 1967) is one of the most acclaimed Swedish architects of our time. She was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and has run her own architectural practice, GIPP Architecture, since 2009. Gipp is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, and her sculptural works have been exhibited at venues such as Liljevalchs Konsthall, Artipelag, Färgfabriken, the Museum of Sketches, Lund Cathedral, and the Venice Biennale. Among Gipp’s most renowned architectural projects are Bruksgården in Höganäs (nominated for the Kasper Salin Prize and the Mies van der Rohe Award), the villa Stupet in Omberg (nominated for the Swedish Villa Prize), and Katedralen in Linköping (nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award

For the exhibition at Vandalorum, Tomas Boman and Kajsa Andersö have created a new film with Petra Gipp. A catalogue is printed with a newly written text by Petter Eklund and pictures by Patrik Lindell.

Thanks to: Landskrona konsthall, Tore G Wärenstam Foundation, Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Estrid Ericson Foundation, Swedish Arts Council, Region Jönköping County, Värnamo Municipality, Vandalorum Partners: Hamrin, Liljedahl, Svenstig