Wanås Konst 2023 presents Carola Grahn

For Summer 2023, Wanås Konst presents Carola Grahn: Trädgränsen [The Tree Line]. Exhibition period: May 6–November 5, 2023. Opening May 6.

Curated by Milena Hoegsberg, Wanås Konst’s new Director and Chief Curator, and Curator Malin Gustavsson.

Trädgränsen [The Tree Line] is a comprehensive exhibition including several newly-produced, large-scale sculptures. Grahn’s practice is characterized by a Sami worldview. Her work raises critical questions about our relationship to society, power structures, and nature, often incorporating humor throughout.

In this exhibition, located across the sculpture park’s forest, visitors encounter a series of newly produced, site-specific artworks: a meter-style machine that releases joiks (an ancient form of Sami singing), a gigantic inflatable sacred mountain, a wooden architectural sculpture loosely based on the motif of a shamanic drum, and a trio of minimalist sculptures consisting of 51 m3fub of timber occupying the entrance to The Shop. The works on view evoke the commodification of nature—exemplified by both forestry and the forest-turned- sculpture park—as well as the spiritual use of natural sites.

In these works, contradictions are encouraged to give rise to questions about “what role Sami cosmology and its view on nature might play in a collective search for a more sustainable way of life” in the artist’s words. Today, many people have a complicated relationship with nature: we admire, romanticize, and long for it, while simultaneously exploiting and consuming it. In Sami mythology, gods and ancestors reside in networks of branches, animals, lakes, and the forest canopy. The natural world was seen as sacred, owned by no one, and the Sami people lived in pursuit of a kinship with the earth and other living beings.

Grahn does not offer simple solutions for adapting this mode of existence to a contemporary lifestyle. Instead, her artworks emphasize different perspectives and encourage reflections on our interactions with nature. The works on view underline the artist’s interest in holding space for the magic and spirit of the forest, in addition to asking how we might find new ways to connect with sites considered portals to the spirit world in Sami spiritualism.

While working on the exhibition, Grahn came to know Wanås as a place. During her time here, she met with forestry experts and hunters while becoming familiar with oak, beech, ash, wild boar, and deer. In several of the works on view, materials from the Wanås estate forest were temporarily removed from their industrial production cycle to become a part of the artwork. After the exhibition closes, they will return to their original contexts. Just like Grahn’s works, the exhibition’s title is open to different interpretations. Trädgränsen gestures to the demarcation between the mountainscape of the North—the edge of the habitat where trees are capable of growing—and areas with dense forest, as well as the boundary between coniferous and deciduous forest that cuts through the Wanås estate. It also points to Grahn’s evocation of the forest as a threshold, suggesting an entryway to alternate modes of interaction with the natural landscape and the world at large