Good Luck Occasions
2008, mixed media installation: wall paintings in acrylic paint, various sizes: covering a 11x4.65m surface. photographic archive consisting of 105 b/w photographs in postcard size (10x15cm). publication containing text and images, 30p/185x285mm, Duende Studios/Rotterdam
ā€¯Good Luck Occasionsā€¯ is a project realized during a studio residency in the Netherlands. It is a personal narrative and research around the sex and drug industry and how it openly takes place within the public and commercial sphere, instead of in a more closed, private space. Sale techniques, architecture and aesthetics were documented and investigated through the construction of a photographic archive, and became the center of the project rather than moral aspects and judgments. For the exhibition, a wall drawing scene portraying ten neon signs was painted in the studio / exhibition space. The contradiction and ambiguity of the romantic and utopian names of these shops, cafĆ©s and bars were at the center. All indicators of their type of business activiy were removed, and the viewer was left with messages such as ā€¯The Futureā€¯, ā€¯Speak Easyā€¯ and ā€¯The Free Worldā€¯, floating on the wall. On the opposite side of the space a photographic archive was installed, in three rows of postcard sized black and white images. It was accompanied by a publication with a personal essay and images from the archive, that visitors could take. After the exhibition the publication was complemented with documentation of the wall drawings, and it has been distributed and exhibited separately as an artistā€™s book at the Swedish Printmakersā€™ Society and Botkyrka Konsthall. For me the project touches upon questions around the archive, of preservation, history writing and the rapid transformation of the urban environment. But it also investigates borders between private and public, between the morally acceptable and unacceptable, and how we can transcend the way we use and look upon our everday environment.
