SLIPPING AWAY
Sébastien Berthier &
Shirin Sabahi

Etikett, Industrigatan 20, Malmö
22 October - 19 November 2010
Fridays, 14:00 - 19:00
Opening Friday 22 October, 18:00 - 23:00

Etikett Malmö presents the exhibition Slipping Away, a collaboration between the artists Sébastien Berthier and Shirin Sabahi. Utilizing found material ranging from state statistics to educational posters and microscopic clinical imagery; the exhibition generates a new perspective by displacing and rearranging these elements anew.
Slipping Away invites us to ponder the preconditions of our place in culture and society. Drawing upon established but nevertheless constructed ideas of belonging and unified culture; the artists propose a slight change of view. Berthier and Sabahi bring back a traumatic historical event into the political debate: the departure of one fourth of the Swedish population for the Untied States at the late 19th century. In recalling this past episode we encounter a reversal of today’s political agenda: the focus being set on migration to Sweden – and not the decrease of Swedes. An unusual angle is also employed in the work “Scandinavian Housewife’s Disease”; a piece borrowing its name from an infection common in the late 19th century, caused by a tapeworm parasite and spread by the habit of eating raw fish.
Both on the level of the nation as subject and on the level of the individual body, we thus drift towards the uncertain or the unstable. Hence subjectivity is not received in terms of the essential, the solid or the elementary, but in terms of an emphasis on the split structure, the porous or the peripheral. Instead of a general mode of things we get something, which is not quite there, indeed something, which is constantly slipping away.

Emil Nilsson