Nilz Källgren at Suprainfinit

Artist: Nilz Källgren

Exhibition title: ((coming undone.

Curated by: Cristina Vasilescu

Venue: Suprainfinit, Bucharest, Romania

Date: February 9 – March 18, 2023

Photography: Mihaela Vezentan / New Folder Studio , all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Suprainfinit, Bucharest

((coming undone. is Nilz Källgren’s first solo exhibition with Suprainfinit Gallery.

The title can be read as both literal or figurative, blunt or poetic. Central to the exhibition is the removal of a wall, previously hiding the window vitrine facing the street outside. Källgren describes this work as a sculpture, rather than a performative intervention. One that depends on the removal and destruction of matter as a creative process. Just like traditional stonemasons and artists would chop and cut away at a block. The exhibition further toys with minimalist aesthetics in a brutal manner – simultaneously caricaturing it, while also expressing a sincere wish for simplicity. Simplicity both in form and in structure.

“I’ve seen myself go through massive burnouts and depression. I’ve gotten sick from my ‘poor man’s jetset-lifestyle.’ It’s a common life within the arts, often in reality more resembling couchsurf-bumming than anything else. A few years back, I crashed completely. It was time for a change. I took refuge in a house in the Swedish forest, without running water or electricity. What a cliché. But there I was. Slowly, I saw myself getting closer and closer to my surroundings, almost melting out into it. Wake up each morning and hike to the lake, through the forest. Cut a hole in the ice with an ax and clean myself. It’s a simple life, yet a hard life. A hunter-gatherer with a smartphone, that’s me. But I think that’s true for all of us. Primitive subjects with fantastic imagination. We have the ability to come up with fantastic ideas, don’t we? But then we find ourselves suffering from our inability to construct humane structures upon realization. Great thinkers, poor doers, are we?”

-Nilz Källgren

Whereas the previous existing wall used to contain, the current sculpture reveals layers of previously hidden structural elements and scars, creating space for breathing and for impermanent materialities to coagulate. Seemingly, the gallery space becomes animated through its own partial destruction.

The withdrawal from very complex processes.
The pain of isolation dissolved into a collective.
The skin – both fragile and an aggressor.

“I think at some level we are all yearning to be part of everything. To be one with everything. But the skin, metaphorically and literally, is stopping us from becoming one. That skin is the container of all that is ‘you’. It also cements our alienation. I keep wondering if the reason many of us feel a strong deathwish is caused from the pain of confronting yourself with what the human project has become, or if it’s just our only way of imagining finally losing ourselves to something symbiotic – a way of being beyond the constraints of your skin.”

-Nilz Källgren
Text by Cristina Vasilescu

This project is financed with the support of EEA Grants 2014 – 2021 within the RO-CULTURE Program.