Trädgård för de blinda / Garden for the Blind Tomelilla Konsthall, January 27 - March 5, 2023
Garden for the Blind revolves around the qualities of transparency. By means of water-colours personal experiences are mirrored through two parallel perspectives on reality.
On the upper floor of the gallery a series of autobiographical works are exhibited, behind glass, where Sjöberg, in dialogue with the author Janet Frame, and her inner experience of mental hospitals, serves to expose motifs of the unseen, which have been collated from his rainbow life. “We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget nor help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighbourhood of light we see our own face.” – Janet Frame.
On the lower floor of the gallery the astronaut Robert Cenkers’ impressions of outer space are borrowed. His unfathomable experience demonstrates to us how the deepest and innermost core of a personal experience can become something directly recognizable to someone else. “Of all the people I’ve spoken to about the experience of space, only those closest to me can begin to understand. My wife knows what I mean by the tone of my voice. My children know what I mean by the look in my eye. My parents know what I mean because they watched me grow up with it. Unless you actually go and experience it yourself you will never know.” The works take their starting point from this experience and include a series of paintings which can be likened to constellations: water-colours painted directly on the reverse side of the glass. Here are also shown a couple of documentations of the observatory AlbaNova’s roof, which is both opened and closed to the blue day.
