LANDSKRONA KONSTHALL
Lisa Trogen Devgun
Solid Bas
December 17, 2022 – February 26, 2023
“Bodies, Logistics, and Labor”,1 “Vems hand är det som gör?“ 2 and “Das Kapital“3 are just a few of the titles in the current stacks of books in Lisa Trogen Devgun’s Stockholm studio, as she is preparing her solo exhibition ”Solid Bas“ at Landskrona Konsthall. The above-mentioned titles map the ground for her ongoing artistic practice concisely – a practice incorporating mass-produced, utilitarian objects as readymades that derive from the realm of logistics and, by implication, of globalized consumerism.
Now, in Landskrona Konsthall, as the visitors circumnavigate the glazed courtyard, they are confronted with stacked plastic palettes, drooping tensioning straps, telescopic roof supports as well as images deriving from product catalogs and logistics magazines. A new feature of Lisa Trogen Devgun’s work is her interest in the human behind the machine, who commonly remains invisible. Her in-depth inquiry into automation and labor as part of a two-year artistic research project at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm4 now manifests itself in this exhibition. The foam rubber grips of the roof supports alude to man-machine interfaces. Additionally, after almost a decade of working exclusively with readymades, for the first time the artist´s hand becomes visible as playing a part in the making: In her latest paper work series Lisa Trogen Devgun doesn´t stop at choosing existing material and recontextualizing it, but actually alters parts of the found images. Through cutting and painting, the images get abstracted and the workers become de-
individualized, which blurs the boundaries between man and machine. The subsequent augmentation of the modified source material has two consequences: On the one hand it magnifies the CMYK-structure of the original print material, which clearly refers to the act of appropriation. On the other hand, it unmistakably zooms in on the traces of the artist’s hand.
The exhibition is arranged in a circuit, as the floor plan of the exhibition space suggests. This circular layout resonates with the cycle of goods which the exhibits are borrowed from. After the duration of the show, during which this cycle is put on hold, the artworks become utilitarian objects again, re-entering the cycle of goods in their original function.
Bernadette Wolbring
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1 Bodies, Logistics, and Labor. Ed. Stefan Burger. Rome: NERO Editions, 2016.
2 Frida Hållander: Vems hand är det som gör? En systertext om konst/hantverk, klass, feminism och om viljan att ta strid (Engl.: Whose Hand is Making? A Sister-Text about Craft, Class, Feminism and the Will to Contest). Gothenburg: Gothenburg University, 2019.
3 To be more precise: Michael Heinrich: Introduktion till de tre volymerna av Marx Kapitalet (Engl.: Introduction to the three volumes of Marx's Capital). Stockholm: Tankekraft förlag, 2013
4 The results are documented in Reality Harvester: Nature After Data After Nature. Eds. Amy Boulton, Lisa Trogen Devgun, Jacob Broms Engblom & Benjamin Gerdes. Gothenburg: Skogen, 2022.