Mimic Octopus 2007
Pigment Print 57x76 cm
We feel for the Schack 2008
C-print 40x50 cm
In Your Room 2008
C-print 40x50 cm
In My Tree 2008
C-print 57x76 cm
Native 2008
C-print 40x50 cm
Cherry Oh Baby 2007
C-print 54x69 cm
Rock Face 2009
C-print 57x76 cm
Walking home with a pink shaggy hat 2008
C-print 57x76 cm
Plastic Bag 2009
C-print 67x94cm
Sweet Leafs 2009
C-print 67x94 cm
Playing by myself 2009
C-print 40x50 cm
Balcony Girl 2008
C-print 40x50cm
Something Here
Epilogue by writer Andrzej Tichý
The Works of Jenny Källman, graphic design: Research and Development.
0. “Incidents and things either come to an end or die; or collapse under their own weight and when I look at them and describe them, it is because they refract the light over themselves, shape it and give it a form that we are able to grasp,” writes Andrzej Stasiuk in Världen bortom Dukla [The World Beyond Dukla].
1. Something shapes the light. The grass meets the gravel meets the water: figures, bodies, shadows. It is a form we are able to grasp. A red clown’s nose between abounding sunlight and a cocktail cabinet engulfed by darkness. I don’t know. What do I do when I want to evoke a white tiger? And which one? A twig in the way, a utilisation of distance. What is it I am asking? To which question is “evoking” the answer?
2. Why is not a question. Why is a frightened cat hissing at the playing wind, at the ominous games of shadows. At blurred masks, at a person that’s been hung but still keeps climbing, at a malicious octopus girl and the mimicry of her victim – the double pony-tails that bring them together, the smaller girl’s transformation from unlike to like. At the stigma of love, a face turned away and the clear signal of a back turned towards you. At an evasive get-together, together alone, an inability to focus on the supposed centre. Supposed because the central thing here is the fact that it is not seen. Or can anyone point out a governing principal?
3. To resemble a reality. The mimicry of these pictures?
4. Try and let the onlooker (as an incident – as a thing) come to an end or die/no/or collapse under its own weight and/no/an inexplicable togetherness and a loneliness pointed at something other than/no.
5. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s anti-essentialism. The aversion of (the myth of) depth is replaced here with ditto against focus, clarity, and also perhaps against verisimilitude. My brain traverses: thus the photograph functioned as a trap in which the artist captured the universe in order to hand it over to society. But we cannot capture, and dominate that which we merely sense. We put an end to the great work of conquering nature and multiplying man’s power. No hubris production, no expansionism. But how?
6. To be here. As a part of being there.
7. No controlling scoptophilia, no suppressed libido?
8. Something is in the way and I want it to stay there like a reminder, true or false, of the fact that the eye – its dark chamber – has nothing to do with it/isn’t a governing principle.
9. I’m urged to lift my gaze somewhere else and glance around the room: notice how things change in appearance as they are further away from you: parallel lines in the floor seem to move closer together; horizontal edges appear to slant; textures compress; details become harder to see. How true is this? And: how conceivable is the difference between a here and a there, between a field of vision and a reality?
10. The continuous against the clearly defined. Infinity and finiteness. Is it true that infinity presupposes the finite? As knowledge does ignorance? Or togetherness solitude? Does it mean that the reality of these pictures presupposes these pictures? A fundamental problem remains: invention or discovery?
12. Two words crop up: makeshift perpetuity. They’re found in Bruno Schulz’s The Sanatorium at the sign of the Hour-Glass: “Then the world was momentarily still; it stood out of breath and dazzled, wanting to be completely at one with that illusory picture, that makeshift perpetuity that had opened up to it.”
13. The temptation of trying to recreate the moment of construction – diagonally downwards, grey-green background behind white cherry blossom, and between these someone who has lost something, someone celebrating something – similar angles, a dark whole surrounded by green in shifting nuances and on the border between the dark and the green, something pink, something blue and something white. Some small people who see something there inside the darkness – and so it continues, repeating patterns, pot-plant green, faded woodland, white in all its guises, a point where worlds meet, the magic of municipal construction, (is this a governing principle?), and sometimes more straightforward: Someone is hiding something. Something happens between someone who is somewhere looking at something; someone takes part of something, someone moves towards or away from something, someone remains with someone else, resembles someone. Something happens here. Something exists here.
Andrzej Tichý, based in Malmö, is the author of the novels Sex liter luft (2005) and Fält (2008).