I will probably always associate Magnus Wallin with chickens.
Almost 20 years ago I saw one of his first exhibitions in the culverts of a condemned power station in Lund. It was a piece entitled “Clean Sunday”, which, in a series of tableaux, addressed a traumatic childhood memory. A few dozen live chickens participated, and the viewers were let through every five minutes.
For dreams and nightmares are dreamt alone. And no one helps you carry the weight of your own past.
Since then I have seen Magnus Wallin, upright, uncompromisingly, saunter to an irrefutable position as one of the main artists of his generation (b. 1965). He has exchanged the chickens for computer game technology, but his goal still seems to be to cuff the viewer in front of his tableaux. The viewer alone.
This time he has Millesgården all to himself, with the exhibition “Instrument.” But I hesitate to call it an exhibition. Inhibition would make more sense. Wallin’s works are dialogues with you and me, one after the other, not hit songs for the masses.
All six pieces that constitute “Instrument” have sterile one-word titles that bring to mind the song titles of the British existentialistic-dystopic band Joy Division. “Colony”, of course, and “Mission”, “Sundown”, “Collection”, “Monochrome”, and “Unnamed.”
One important element in the world of computer game technology—a world that Wallin perhaps all too often is associated with—is the physics engine. It is the physics engine that calculates and simulates how a body moves when affected by external forces. There are games that are completely built around the very fascination of seeing gravity enacting itself on the computer screen. “Portal” is one example, but any flipper or football simulation would do.
With Magnus Wallin, it is as if the physics engine was upgraded with an existential temperament. “Mission” is an animated film that takes us on a tour through a Panopticon—the kind of prison structure used by French philosopher Michel Foucault as a metaphor for all kinds of social institutions—where sad skeletons endure time. Gravity seems to be the prison warden in this claustrophobic vision of our own mortality, burdened with the relentless weight of time.
In “Colony”, another animated film, skeletons are hurled onto an ice-covered, black-and-white river, which brings to mind Lethe—the river of forgetfulness in the ancient underworld. In Wallin’s film, the skeletons, equipped with impressive erections, immediately begin mechanically fulfilling the pleasure principle. And it’s all devastatingly dreary and desperate. One doesn’t even have to be familiar with the art historical references to Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” to feel the onset of tragedy.
But the work that impresses me most is “Unnamed”, where Wallin makes the viewer pass through dense curtains, into a pitch-dark room. When your eyes have adjusted to the dark, you see a projection on the opposite wall.
You can make out nearly a dozen shadow-like figures. They are taken from a 1922 German textbook on surgery, but they take on the shapes of the dead people that we have forgotten. And when you are standing in the dark, straining your eyes to discern even the slightest hint of a face, it’s easy to get the feeling that they are doing the same. Ghostly shadows from the mists of our past; mere remnants of the people they used to be, and reminders of what we will all become one day.
In case anyone is wondering what has happened to the flesh in this carnival of bones and mortality, “Monochrome” consists of skin, and “Sundown”, partly, of blood. And thus Magnus Wallin gives the concept of human tissue a new meaning, and it is the viewer that gets to be the anatomist at this utterly indispensable exhibition.
—Jonas Thente
(translated by Niclas Nilsson)