16.5.—16.6.2024

The second exhibition in our Nordic series, supported by the Nordic Culture Fund, is by Rasmus Ramö Streith (born in Falköping, Sweden, in 1985, lives in Malmö). He graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2018) and has exhibited at Malmö Konsthall (2022), Kolonin in Arvika, Sweden (2022) and Galleri Arnstedt in Östra Karup, Sweden (2019) and elsewhere. His work is collected by Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Prologue 

Over the horizon was the moon. I looked up and saw a huge oval shape, covered with fur. A pair of leathery, flapping wings extended on each side. The landscape beneath me was littered with holes. No trees, no houses, no roads, no people. Just row upon row of holes. 

Whatever held on to me slowly lost altitude. 

Now I could see that each hole had an object placed inside it. Bike, tire, gravestone, trash can, plastic cup, door, plate, bottle, knife, dress, computer, book, ladder, key . . .

The creature sat me down very carefully. Then it just stood there, like a dark pillar. Its bulging eyes reminded me of black spheres, impossible to look into. I thought it was speaking to me. But then there was nothing where it had been only a moment ago. 

I couldn’t move my feet. I was stuck. My legs had turned into wood. Finely carved and lacquered. Like the leg of a chair or a dining table.

Rasmus Ramö Streith’s film- and object-based installations conjure up uncanny scenes among elements of everyday life. His exhibition ’The set is a skull’, shown at Kohta during the spring, is built around the video work The Un dead (2018). Its action takes place in a haunted house where people and furniture have become all but interchangeable. The plot, at the same time a surreal sequencing and a report on material reality, lets us glimpse what is happening between those four walls. It is an abandoned-looking interior where amateur actors perform protracted actions on repeat. The video is recorded on VHS with a camera from 1985. These technical limitations create a time-specific filter, a low resolution for painterly effect. The sound is clear and sharp and achieves the effect of unsettling the relations between image, sound and object. In Ramö Streith’s visual universe illusion is always a glitch, a dreamlike uneasiness.

– Emily Fahlén