|
Per Hüttner is a Swedish visual artist who lives and works in Paris, France. He graduated from Konsthögskolan in Stockholm 1993. He also studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin 1991-1992. He is mostly known for his photographic work and for his interactive, changing and travelling exhibition projects. A number of monographs about his practice has been published including Per Hüttner, 2003; I am a Curator, 2004; Repetitive Time 2006, Xiao Yao You 2006 and Democracy and Desire 2007.
Biography
Hüttner was born in Oskarshamn, Småland on 11 February 1967. His father Bengt, who was Jewish, died in a car accident in 1971 and he was brought up by his Protestant mother with his sister. He moved around Sweden until the age of 24 when he moved to Berlin to study. His life has since been marked by a restless nomadism , where travel and international projects are core to his life and practice. He lived in London, Los Angeles until he created his base in Paris in 2002. Hüttner was one of the founders of the non-profit galleries Konstakuten in Stockholm (1996–2001) and The Hood Gallery in Los Angeles (2001–2003), the former was one of the in the country and lead to the creation of a great number of alternative spaces in Sweden. He is also the father of the experimental research group Vision Forum.
Works
Hüttner's work investigates our perception of reality by looking at the limits of time, identity and rationality and tries to provoke curiosityand imagination in the minds of the visitor enabling them to create loopholes of personal freedom for themselves. The work often deals with transformation, change or various forms of transgressions of boundaries or borders and looks particularly at how the relationship between larger political, economical and social structures affect the individual and vice versa. The work always has a clear relationship to the history ofperformance and the artist relates to this genre in innovative ways.
In the late 1980s and 1990s much of Hüttner's installations used computers, video and other new media. He was one the first artists to build installations around actual computers, using them as a sculptural elements and at the same time allowing them to present vast and complex information]]. He also used contemporary medical science and developed work based on research on the human brain at the Pitt Rivers Museum in the UK and in an exhibition, publication and series of lectures dealing with the relationship between art, science and thehuman body with biochemist Elias Arnér ] in Stockholm in 1991 and 1992 .
In the late 1990s Hüttner took the experience of dealing with art and science and implemented this knowledge into a series of exhibitions investigating the relationship between the art object and the exhibition. In 2001 he co-curated an exhibition at Nylon with Goshka Macugaand Gavin Wade. Other noteworthy exhibitions that dealt with these issues and that engaged the audience in continuously reshaping the exhibition was: I am a Curator at Chisenhale Gallery in London and Participate?at CEAC in Xiamen, China and at Basekamp inPhiladelphia .
Parallel to this activity Hüttner created a photography project entitled "Jogging in Exotic Cities" where the artist went jogging for a week in far away cities that remain exotic to a western audience. In the photographs we see the artist dressed in white jogging clothes as he makes his way through bustling cities like Chennai, Mexico City and Lusaka. The project probably remains Hüttner's most well-known. It has been shown in major museums in the USA, Spain Poland, Romania, Austria, China and Sweden.
In 2004 he developed the performative aspects in the above mentioned interactive projects and tied it back a research about the limits of reality, fantasies and imagination. He developed a series of photographs where he created shrines of commemoration in busy street corners of urban centres around the world. ] These become portals between different realities, underlining that the difference between the documentary and fictional is related to process rather than content. The work leaves the idea of depicting an outside reality and focus more explicitly on the inner life of human beings. In the catalogue text to his 2006 exhibition Xiao Yao You at the Guangdong Museum of Art inGuangzhou the curator, Zhang Wei, writes
"Ceaseless movement is not a way of gaining ever more exotic knowledge of the world; it is rather a way of cleaning out and rediscovering the self. This is what I see in Per’s work. When I face his images, the reality presented in them seems less a true physical reality than an invisible psychological one. I see a negotiation and dialogue between the artist’s inner and outer worlds. In this psychological landscape, he describes his worries, his pursuit of human sentiment, and his insistent rejection of a stylized or superficial life. It makes me think of the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi’s idea of xiao yao you or “moving carelessly.” This philosophy does not only detail how to move freely across physical space, but is also a metaphor for how humans can transcend different kinds of obstacles and achieve a freedom of the spirit."
The journey into the human soul and its ambiguous qualities were further developed in photographic work primarily shot at night with very long exposure in 2006-07. The large scale images were often coupled with drawings when exhibited. These were created under performative circumstances. The relationship between the individual and its search for personal liberty again comes to the forefront in the meeting of the dreamlike photography and surreal drawings. In the catalogue text to the exhibition Democracy and Desire the work is discussed. In a typical style of the artist, it is hard to decipher who the author of the give text is, or even if the different texts are written by different writers:
"The uninhibited mental and/or physical space is very individual and extremely hard to define. But it is even more complicated, because this freedom can never be safe-guarded by consumerism, legislation or democracy anymore than the self-confidence that feeds it can be defended by a law. As artists it is our prime responsibility to fight for the right to retain and enjoy this liberty for ourselves and others. This means that we need to have an extremely grounded belief in ourselves and the work that we do. Humanity will always be engaged in a battle to safeguard this freedom and maybe that is also a good definition of what an artist is – a confident defender of the aspects of the soul that cannot be defended any other way. It has always been like that throughout history"
In recent years, Hüttner has returned to a dialogue with science and to working with video. Major solo exhibitions in France, China and Sweden in 2007-2010 have brought out an ambiguous narrative in the work. Installations such as "Do not Go Gentle" and "Imminent" show eccentric people engaged in unexpected and surreal research that forces the visitor to reflect both on the relationship between reality and fiction and how science plays an important role in shaping them both. In her long text about the latter exhibition , curator Cecilia Canziani shows that this is an age old problematic:
"In Plato’s Symposium, perhaps the best known of his dialogues, Aristofanes recounts that once upon a time, human beings had two heads, four arms, four legs, they were complete, a whole, a unity. Because of their arrogance they were punished by Zeus and divided in two halves: men and women. Since then, we look for completion in the other, and such- arguably - along as being a metaphor of love, also serves as a symbol of the dialectic between singularity and collectivity that informs the political organisation of society. In "Imminent" it is not just the narrative that is fragmented, but also the characters and their multiplied personae. Different actors are cast in the same role, sometime one character is transformed into another, reminding us of the quest for unity that Plato describes."
Parallel to these relatively traditional exhibitions, the artist has also staged events that cross the boundaries of academic presentations, performance and stand-up comedy. These have taken place at major institutions like MACRO in Rome, CAPC in Bordeaux, Tate Britain in London and as part of experimental projects like The Invisible Generation.
(from: Wikipedia- The Free Encyclopedia)
|
