Pictures from the art installation Jerusalem by the artist Ann Edholm and the author Tom Sandqvist, October 22, 2022 – January 8, 2023 at Sörmland Museum in Nyköping, Sweden.
JERUSALEM
An installation by Ann Edholm and Tom Sandqvist
Text: Tom Sandqvist
Translated by Christina Wallnér
Smoky, almost black paintings with a black sharp wedge. A curtain of red wedges against a gray-black blazing sky. A voice that grindingly monotonously tells about the technical installations, about the guards’ leisure and work benefits in the extermination camp, in addition, a video from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem with some visitors incessantly lighting and extinguishing bunches of burning candles under a sooty tin hood at the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre. At the same time, a book that revolves around Jerusalem, about the small towns in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust and not least about death at Auschwitz: the dream of the heavenly Jerusalem, which went up in smoke.
Artist Ann Edholm’s and author Tom Sandqvist’s joint installation Jerusalem evokes both feelings and thoughts about our existential predicament, our responsibility as a human being, our place in existence, guilt and (un)possible reconciliation. And it is no coincidence that the almost identical smoky, sooty paintings with the black wedge are fourteen in number as they indirectly refer to the medieval legend of the fourteen stations on the Via Dolorosa along which Christ staggered towards Golgota in Jerusalem.
The installation consists of, among other things, Ann Edholm’s fourteen smoke-black paintings with a large painting with vertical red wedges as a kind of focal point in relation to the installation’s sound work by Tom Sandqvist in which a monotonous grinding voice revolves over and over again around the Auschwitz extermination camp (which is not mentioned), the technical installations and the guards’ leisure life and work benefits. How effective was the machinery, how orderly were the working conditions!
The publication Jerusalem
The installation also includes a publication in which Tom Sandqvist reflects on Jerusalem, the city in the center of the world, on the villages and small towns in the Jewish settlement area in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust and not least on death at Auschwitz. Here is the dream of heavenly Jerusalem, which went up in smoke.
TOM SANDQVIST (born 1954) is an author and professor emeritus of art theory and the history of ideas. In addition to novels, he has published a wide range of art historical and art theoretical studies. Most recently, he was featured in the novel Hemma i Drohobycz about the Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz and his relationship with Jewish philosophy and the tradition of thought, last year (2022) with the novel Amor fati.
ANN EDHOLM, born in 1953, is one of the most acclaimed artists in Swedish contemporary art known for her often monumentally acting compositions. With a long series of solo exhibitions in Sweden as well as abroad, in Germany, the USA, Great Britain, France and Belgium, and among other things noted for her public decoration at the UN headquarters in New York in 2013, Ann Edholm combines meticulous and in the smallest gesture classic painting with simple geometric shapes.
Ann Edholm and Tom Sandqvist live and work in Lid, Nyköping, Sweden.
Read about the artist
Ann Edholm
Prints in limited edition:
The Gallery of Ann Edholm
© Photo: Christina Wallnér, No WaIT AB