John Skoog ? Walls

Collectors Agenda
Franz-Josefs-Kai 3 | 3rd floor | Suite 16 | 1010 Vienna

John Skoog (*1985 Kvidinge, Sweden) studied at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where he still lives occasionally, besides Copenhagen. His films have been screened at numerous international film festivals – among others at the Berlinale, and in Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Paris, Los Angeles – and have been presented the world over in gallery and institutional shows, including the solo shows Slow Return at Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt am Main, and Värn at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Vienna in 2015.

The exhibited series of works, titled Walls, makes reference to Reduit (Redoubt) from 2014, one of Skoog?s most important video works which won him the prestigious Baloise Art Prize. For its production, Skoog meticulously filmed every part of the house of Karl-Göran Persson, a farmer who used to live near Skoog?s home town Kvidinge in the province of Skåne, Southern Sweden.

Compelled by a warning of potential Sovjet strikes, issued by the Swedish government in the 1940s, the same farmer built an improvised fortress, made of reinforced concrete and scrap material, as a community refuge from a looming Sovjet invasion.

Impressed since his childhood by this monstrous bunker in the middle of the landscape near his home, Skoog and his brothers set out to document the various walls of the bunker in a cloak-and-dagger operation. Using a simple handscanner they scanned the walls strip by strip and exposed inclusions in the concrete. Walls is comprised as a series of eleven unique pieces, of which ten will be on show. Each piece tells its own story of personal fate and a collective sense of anxiety, of open landscape and existential angst.

Coinciding with the show, gallery Zeller van Almsick are opening City without Name with Wolfgang Lerner that night, on the same floor.