Mathilda Frykberg
Hunger & Thirst
Ukraine series
Vault behind vault
Turismo romantico
Kyrie eleison
Mediterranean sea
Look at the signs of the time
God is the source of light in all luminous objects
Biography
News
Letter
God is the source of light in all luminous objects
2019
2019
Installation with light, plastic, sound, text, video.
A project investigating the relations between electronic dance music, religion and war.
Exhibited at Gallery Rotor, HDK-Valand, 2019.
A project investigating the relations between electronic dance music, religion and war.
Exhibited at Gallery Rotor, HDK-Valand, 2019.
I read some articles highlighting nightclubs in places known for conflicts: Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, Donbass in Ukraine.
I read about about a still-thriving night life where people are going out dancing not far away from where the oppositional forces are dropping bombs.
I read about russian soldiers dancing together with Syrian locals at the clubs of Aleppo in 2014.
These articles stay with me and affect me deeply. It is for me both strange and eye-opening information. How can people continue to dance when everything around them is falling apart? It makes me think about psychological and existential conditions of human life. Our constant need for solace, euphoric contamplation and places to rest in the middle of the trauma. I begin to think about the dance floor as a secular room for alternative religious practice.
The dance floor is a place for shimmering, blinking, dropping, beating lights. It is the home for the extravagant lights: stroboscopes, blinking spotlights, different colors. Bodies interacting, dancing with the light, playing with the light, relaxing, laughing, kissing, screaming, crying with the light.
If the dance floor is a religious room then all these actions are ceremonial, alternative praises.