A Corner With Emma Bäcklund

05.10. - 08.10.2017

A Corner With was a series of exhibitions taking place in our studio in Dalston in London. Each artists was invited a month before the launch evening, to use the studio space as their studio and create new work. Sketches of the floor plan was asked by each artists to see how ideas and the space transforms.

Bäcklund’s work surround the continuous fascination in parallels and relations between cognitive and physical experience as well as control structures opposed to complete discharge of boundary. When learning a new movement or language, repeated actions are performed until this gesture becomes automatic. The tongue, a strong muscle alike a hand, both internal and external. Our tool for utterance allow expression to sip through between our teethes. An organ erotically charged. Bäcklund is interested in how cultural, religious and architectural structures embody the physical body and play on the idea of conservatism and eroticism belonging in the same space. Gestures of religious healing rituals knead and steer with entangled hands. Loose hair is filled within walls to occasionally become exposed. The rambling tongue speaks someone else’s language and lends its physical form, moving and being moved by something else. A maze offer choices of path and direction, while a unicursal labyrinth has only a single path to the centre. The ongoing idea of the muscle as a mind question familiar and yet unknown movements to the body. What happens when detaching oneself from form and expectation and in what context is that expected? The habitual structure of the lived body is that which connects us to the world and language is bodily anchored, but can other movements occur by the very act of belief? Structural systems of language are reversed and questioned. Paradoxes of engagement and distance coexist within the same field and one seem to linger in a slippery slippage between letting go of one to enter the other. To disengage self from image, one continue in the search for tunnels where emotions can channel and find oneself yet again returning to the image, held.

Sketches by emma bäcklund in the month leading up to the show:

Emma Bäcklund is a Swedish artist based in London. Her work concern interests in restraint related to the body and cultural structures. Ideas of obstruction aim to question how forms and bodies adapt to change, environment and ideals. Working in a process of re-contextualising objects or bodies they become detached from initial milieu to become dysfunctional because of this shift. With a background in dance, interests in the body and spatiality continue to influence her ideas with focus on balance and distribution of weight. The physical relationship to images are essential in her process of making and the photograph as a performative document explore elements of gesture. There are slippages between image, object and subject.