CANDYLAND shows Natalie Sutinen’s new short films ”Fazer’s dog” and ”Water” from 2021 and ”Herbarium” from 2019.
Vernissage Friday 12 February at 17–20.
Put on warm clothes and only come if you feel completely healthy.
The films can be seen from the street Wednesday – Sunday 17–24. Open Friday – Sunday at 13–16, when ”Fazer’s dog” can be seen in the gallery, until Sunday 14 March.
Gotlandsgatan 76, Stockholm. Bus 3 and 76 to Gotlandsgatan or metro to Skanstull.
Beautiful Jimsonweed
The films are about a woman who can control her subconscious. She can move between different dimensions at short intervals. We follow her above the clouds where the sun shines almost unbelievably strong and then dive straight into a swarming sea of plants in a lake. Natalie Sutinen’s mental world in cross section, she moves freely between three places – below the surface, above the clouds and in a forest. It’s like stepping into her head.
Ghosts that sway over a night-black river and whose trembling legs can be traced to the water lilies’ entangling sex education below the water’s surface, in the middle of the bright day. Restlessly we alternate between light and dark; it is as if Sutinen tests darkness and light adaptation by moving between outside and inside on a sunny summer day. But the eye gradually gets used to it and we absorb information from silhouettes and shadows. It is a fast process that only takes a few minutes and to achieve the feeling of the same phenomenon, Sutinen switches the images in his works at the same speed.
Selected areas in the forest landscape are covered with a blue fabric. Is she trying to patch up the plants? Tear marks on the planet have become more and more visible, deeper and deeper. We are in Ramnäs, outside Uppsala, where a burnt-down forest has begun to recover. The absence of insects and birds is reminded when the silence is broken by a helicopter with scouting rangers. Some plant and animal species have adapted to this and in order to remain, they are dependent on the drastic changes that forest fires bring. Their seeds can lie in the ground for a very long time and ”wait for it to burn”. They only germinate, flower and form new seeds after a fire. Many of the plants may have already become extinct, but through this utility system they give us a second chance to see their rare splendor. The bigger picture is hard to fathom, it is not possible to know what we are missing.
”From a sense of positive isolation, as I remember the summers of my childhood, far away from civilization, I mix contemporary processed material with my own experience of parallel worlds, a refuge I had during my childhood and which still persists.”
Natalie Sutinen works mainly with film that is integrated into sculptural installations. An interest in what is true and authentic runs like a thread through her work where the film process becomes an examination of our personal relationship to all images as a means of discovering ourselves.
Natalie Sutinen (b. 1972) works in Stockholm, Sweden. She has trained at Kungl. Stockholm Academy of the Arts (MFA-05) and Gerrit Rietveld Academy of Art, Amsterdam. She has received several work scholarships and scholarships for costly projects from the Arts Council, residency scholarships from the Academy of Fine Arts; Hôtel Chevillion, Grez-sur-Loing, France, Cite International des Arts, Paris and she has i.a. awarded the Gerhard and Peggy Bonnier Scholarship. Sutinen has shown his works at Umeå Art Gallery, Halmstad Art Museum, Gallery East / Art Academy, Gallery Niklas Belenius, Växjö Art Gallery, Haninge Art Gallery, RIFF International Film Festival, USA. The short film ”Héron – fragrance of violence” has been awarded Best Experimental at the Annual Copenhagen Film Festival in Denmark,
Natalie Sutinen is invited by Teresia Oweson, tess [at] candyland.se
