about

Martin Karlsson

My artistic activities mainly include documentary practices, often presented as context- or site specific works. Some are made as full-scale representations, or rather re-representations. Others are more depictive, made in medias visually referring to aspects of the original. Over the last few years I have mainly been working with stagings of history, which I also have experienced myself through active role-playing games. During recent years I have, for instance, documented so-called historical Re-enactments and Living History-museums. These projects looks at how history is inscribed into contemporary culture, and how history is being constructed and used as a tool for defining national and individual identity as well as the society as a whole. I sometimes complete the visual pieces with articles and lectures, giving them a conceptual and a cultural context.
 Earlier works include a public comission in Linköping’s University Park from 2003. I moved and restored an allotment garden and a cottage from a nearby allotment area that were to be torn down. It became a monument over the razed area and at the same time a collectively-run allotment for students at Linköping University. In Kulturhuset (the House of Culture ) in Stockholm during the same year I re-created a “seating-pit”, an interior which was a symbol of the 1970’s Kulturhuset. Both the allotments and the snugglepit were functional in a practical and everyday way, which made them into something more than memorial art works. In 2005, at Gallery Brändström & Stene in Stockholm, I exhibited a large series of photographs, “Arcadia”, based at the romantic architecture of the nearby Haga Park, with artificial caves, ruins, Roman tents and Chinese temples. The photographs depicted 18th century European gardens as a kind of physical virtual reality of this fabricated yet existing Arcadia. I based my work for an exhibition for Index at Stockholm’s City Museum in 2006 on the museum’s archives on an environmental construction representing 16th century Stockholm, which was mounted at the Stockholm Fair in 1897. In the exhibition the archive material was contrasted with documentations of a contemporary local reenactment-group which portray the same historical epoch.

Martin Karlsson, August 2008

Interview; Martin Karlsson in conversation with Markus Degerman, for the exhibition at Index/Stockholm City Museum, february 2006