The Body´s Thin Shell - an interactive installation in collaboration with Robert Johansson

ARS06, Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki (FI) 2006
Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg (SE) 2004
Bomuldsfabrikken, Arendal (NO) 2004
Stenersenmuséet, Oslo (NO) 2004

The Body's Thin Shell presents a cross between classical sculpture and a fitness gym, where the weights resembleble animals.
The Body's Thin Shell builds upon active participation. The audience can choose between the roles of viewer and actor, someone who makes the work move and live, or switch between the two. The piece only works with participation. When the visitor begins to use the equipment, the sculptural pieces are transformed into behaviour in the present. The work becomes tactile art that involves the whole body, and where the audience can acquire something of a donkey's endurance, a bird’s chest muscles or a snake's suppleness. The piece examines the current culture of self-control, where the body is not an instrument for physical work, but physical exercise is instead used to build and control our bodily exterior. The work is a gym of excessive decadence, full of mysticism, eroticism and perversion. The air could be filled with groans, bodily fluids and the odour of bulging muscles.
Animality and self-discipline are given free rein in collective exhibitionism that recalls the worship of the perfect body. However, it is not the perfectly sculpted body that the work focuses on, but our struggle against transitoriness and the sweaty, cleansing path to strength, attractiveness and wellbeing.

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