Marina Abramovic seemed to be everywhere these days and to my delight her Lisson Gallery exhibition contained several of her earlier work from the 1970's. A personal favorite of mine is the "Light/Dark" video where she and her former collaborator Ulay take turn in slapping each other at an increasing speed until Abramovic ducks, avoids the slap thus ending the circle.

At the White Cube Mason's Yard, I got completely engulfed in Christian Marclay's new video piece "The Clock" that oddly both heighten my awareness of time while at the same time completely losing my sense of it as a linear occurence. The video encompasses thousands of film segments that contains a clock, edited together to a 24 hour long piece where the clocks on screen in fact shows the actual time.

In the Louise Bourgeois - Fabric Works exhibition at Hauser & Wirth one of her mother spider was hoovering over the art crowd in the night.

Before leaving town I also took the chance to see my fellow Swede but now UK based Karin Kihberg and Reuben Henry's exhibition at Danielle Arnaud. Previously I had only seen their video "Inbindable Volume (2010)" on a monitor and it was great to see it as intended - projected and I am looking forward to when we at Galleri Box in Gothenburg, Sweden (where I am a boardmember) will exhibit it this spring. In fact you will also be able to see their work in April right here in Portsmouth at the aspex gallery where they will have a solo Exhibition as 1st Prize winners of the Emergency 4.

Karin Kihberg and Reuben Henry "Inbindable Volume 2010"

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ABOUT THE PORTSMOUTH CASTING PROJECT

During my residency in Portsmouth I am developing a project that includes body castings from live local models. The idea is that these body parts from different individuals will be assembled into one figure. This figure becomes the representation for the "average" Portsmouth inhabitant. To reflect the demographics of Portsmouth have been casting male and females white British 20-40 year old average height and weight but also representatives from the less than 10% non-white British minority communities in the area as well as persons of much older age.

The starting point for my project is the techniques of the old renaissance masters Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo’s usage of several different models in order to create one ideal figure. With the Vertruvian man Da Vinci illustrated his ideas of the ideal human (proportions) which he saw as a “cosmografia del minor mondo” (cosmography of the microcosm) believing the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe. But my ideas, living in the 21^st century, of the perfect figure or human being is rather based upon the beauty of a multiethnic collage of cultures existing within the same figure. It might be more connected to a baroque (from barrocco meaning imperfect pearl) idea of the necessity of imperfection in order to achieve perfection.

Thank you all who participated!

This part of my project is now finished.