Artists

Annika Eriksson

Press release

There are moments in which order appears less as a system than as a fragile agreement between things. A cat asleep on a window sill. A chair shifted slightly toward the open window. Three empty cardboard boxes that nobody remembers bringing into the room. A blanket preserving the outline of someone no longer there. For now, this is the order of things, while light continues to move through the room long after it has changed purpose. For more than four decades, Annika Eriksson has developed work attentive to the unstable arrangements through which figures inhabit space alongside one another. Her films, performances, and installations observe how gestures, habits, and routines organize forms of living together: how proximity is negotiated, how behavior adjusts itself under observation, and how invisible structures shape everyday life. Because the world is full of eyes. In Eriksson's work, observation rarely functions as mastery. Instead, it circulates as exposure, vulnerability, and attachment. The distance required for observation is never secure. One begins by watching another creature only to discover that the creature has become a companion. Or a rival. Or a mirror. Animals stare back with a patience that unsettles the scene, while humans begin regulating themselves the moment they realize they are being watched. Someone observes from across the room while another refuses to return the gaze. Near a doorway, a dog waits without explanation: teeth, drool, language. Yet beneath this fragile coexistence lies another tension. What first appears as attentiveness slowly darkens into fixation. A gaze lingers too long. Habits become compulsions. Attention turns into surveillance. Systems begin producing exceptions. Rules generate loopholes. The situation starts developing a life of its own. Meanwhile the cat keeps sleeping through the entire thing. Because every order also contains a command. In and order, Eriksson approaches these situations through a constellation of forms that continuously rearrange the relationship between image, object, and space. Moving-image works—described by Eriksson as "anti-videos"—coexist with small- and large-scale collages, dioramas, and a sculptural environment that extends across the exhibition. If collage traditionally assembles fragments into a new image, here it also becomes a way of organizing the page, the wall, and the room itself. Images return in altered forms and unexpected scales. They cluster together, spill outward, and occasionally threaten to overwhelm the structures intended to contain them. What begins as an act of organization gradually approaches obsession; what appears orderly threatens, at any moment, to become absurd. Throughout her career, Eriksson has approached such structures not through abstraction but through lived situations: through acts of observation, imitation, compliance, resistance, and refusal. For her first solo exhibition at Kunstverein München in 2003, Eriksson presented Arbeitswelt, turning her attention toward the behavioral structures surrounding labor and security through conversations with fifty-five employees at the Munich offices of the insurance company Swiss Re. Across a three-channel video installation lasting two hours, office routines, interviews, and everyday forms of conduct gradually accumulated into an unusual portrait of a workplace and the social relations that sustained it. Twenty-three years later, similar questions emerge elsewhere. No longer located primarily in institutional structures, they surface in domestic interiors, among animals, and in the small habits through which everyday life is arranged. and order is supported by the Swedish Embassy Berlin and realized with the generous support of IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee's International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts and H&D Digitaldruck.