Ylva Snöfrid
Art in the Light of Conscience/ Excerpts from The Painter’s Studio in the Shadow World and Fantasia

A series of physical excerpts (as allegories) from the The Painter’s Studio in the Shadow World, my holistic art work in Athens, and of its three-fold reflection Fantasia, the large painting installation I made in Istanbul for The Seventh Continent, the 16th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.

For the last years I’ve had a second home in Athens, or actually it has been my first real home, where I have lived with my loved ones, and they have lived with me, creating a new kind of living situation that has included the making of a place to live in from scratch, to make the furniture, and the toys, and a home school for the girls. This is a three dimensional living situation as an existential and philosophical idea of life, to make the living and art part of the reality, our reality. To eat on paintings and sleep on paintings and execute life and the daily rituals on paintings and through paintings. The rituals are tools for the paintings through which they are completed, to be executed through their life experiences, to develop their soul through life, to make them go through a “hestekur” a horse cure. This work has remained secluded since the very start some years ago, so the relation to the viewer has been quite different, because it’s never been open, friends have been invited, and they have consumed the work in its whole, as a consequence of its nature.

Last year in Istanbul, I made a three-fold mirror fantasy over this work that was open to the public, and fully transparent. I called the work FANTASIA, a Reflection of the Painter’s Studio in the Shadow World, Divided in Three Parts, Dystopia, Heterotopia, Utopia. It was a performance piece in parts, and comprised parts of our temporary habitat in Istanbul, i.e. our children’s teddies, clothes, and things from their home-school; they also contributed to the work and some of the performances. We lived with the piece in Istanbul, just as in Athens, as the work evolved, and used all the paintings in our daily rituals, to eat, to sleep, etc. For the opening of The Seventh Continent I made 3 pairs of eye-paintings in the installation, which I painted in a 6 day long performance, and reflect the present states of the piece during that time frame. Afterwards, I brought this piece to Athens to be contained within the The Painter’s Studio in the Shadow World. The unseen and the seen, the mirror and its reflections, are all under the same roof of my growing home.
The show at the Breeder presents these physical excerpts (as allegories), in an uncensored form, as they have been used and lived with. It is a summary of my artistic and moral life until now, a reflection of the actions I make, as part of a whole and as part of the machinery we call society and our world. Art in the light of conscience*.

*Art in the light of conscience, is a book by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

-Ylva Snöfrid

The Breeder is pleased to present “Art in the Light of Conscience/ Excerpts from The Painter’s Studio in the Shadow World and Fantasia”, a solo exhibition by Ylva Snöfrid. Ylva Snöfrid recently participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud (2019) and at 2019 Performa in New York curated by Kathy Noble. In Athens she previously presented ”Snöfrid under the shadow of Athena, the Oracle said: the body is the shelter” as the start of Kunsthalle Athena curated by Marina Fokidis (2009).