Ida Lennartsson

OFFAL

How Podium sees it, Ida Lennartsson balances private and collective truths in the way she displaces the body, organs and the natural order of fluids. What you imagine to be natural, becomes weirder yet somehow closer to experienced living, encultured forms, bringing the layers of fiction in our repetitive presence into focus. With OFFAL Podium is very pleased to present Lennartsson’s eponymous video installation and her most recent sculptures.

I am freezing. And the eye I have left throbs, and all the time I try to open my phantom eye. I have the feeling it is still there,
I can sense it just below my scar, if only I could blink it would open up, my phantom eye would let me see what I cannot.
—Marie Darrieussecq, Notre vie dans les forêts, 2017

Far away from wellness and care, Lennartsson’s protagonist (her double, an information-shade) makes-do with prosthesis for these qualities in a dense and fever-light world. In our days, a time where all are individuals enacting accepted patterns of behaviour, similarity is the biggest fear and a carrier of dense truth. The doppelgänger is your death enemy because you are each others nadirs yet strive to occupy the same spot. It is the kind of similarity that evaporates place (the thing/being’s position in space) and time (when it/they is/are present) and threatens your existence. The nagging feeling is: who needs you if I can have a more ideal version of myself? Where would you keep your meat puppet, your organ-reservoir, in what location? In the quote from Darrieussecq the creature tries to open an organ lost, not able to ascertain her place in the social fabric puzzle. Is she primary, is she living matter? Open your ribs wide, breathe.

The earth sticks to my tailbone, its moving underneath the skin layer, I twist, try to brush it off with my hands. Are these gloves where resistance emerges, or is this sensation… how long will this cold inhabit my bones? There are voids within this form, where my presence keeps poisoning me. I curve and invert, backwards to the beginning. Not to continue forever, drifting, rather cease to have been. Unlocking the dribble of time. These eternal pools below me, my body leaking, can it not stop, the root from growing thicker, attaching itself to these splayed ribs. Hollow earth mode. Dispersed, filtered, re-sown until the presence lets go.

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Ida Lennartsson (born in Mjölby/SE, lives and works in Berlin/DE) achieved her BA at Oslo National Academy of Art and her MA at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. Her practice encompasses objects, video and performance. She works with circumstances, establishing links between the object, their symbolic meaning, their social and economic value, and the viewer’s reading. In so doing, Lennartsson focuses on the object’s symbolic strengths, which she reveals and whose universal significance she calls into question. She has exhibited at places such as Galerie Karin Günther (Hamburg), SiteA Gallery (Yokohama), Holodeck (Oslo), GSL Projects (Berlin), Kunsthaus Hamburg (Hamburg), Projects Arts Centre (Dublin). Lennartsson is a co-founder of the feminist platform CALL, and has worked and resided in Koganecho Yokohama (Japan) and Busan (South-Korea).