A Counterculture of The Dormant Brain?

Emet Brulin

Ksenia Pedan’s Forming the Culture of a Dormant Brain is a rare exhibition: it lives up to its title. The spectator is forced to cultivate their brain to apprehend what is on display. But whose is the dormant brain? It is tempting to read the title as a critique of a local art scene that often feels quiescent and populated with lethargic spectators. And, by extension, of scantly thinking contemporary subjectivity. Pedan, it seems, wants to activate our sensibility and get thinking going. In that view, Pedan’s show is a work of daring, imaginative force. The Ukraine-born, Stockholm-based artist extends her exhibition beyond the art object by incorporating parts of the building’s interiors. Doubt is cast and thought is activated. Is that electrical socket part of the game? Has the emergency exit always been there? What about the ceiling?

Forming the Culture of a Dormant Brain appears to consist of one thing: intensity, at work on two levels – thought and emotion. Stepping into Pedan’s exhibition means displacing oneself into an intensive field rather than merely changing location from one extended space to another. The exhibition embraces an infinite number of elements, although some can be enumerated, and is structured by the five hybrid works Columns/Chapters 1–5 (2024): wall-bound columns of frosted glass, aluminium bars, and photographs. One of them is partly covered by a white, unconnected radiator. On the walls are four blue and grey oil pastel paintings with superimposed photos of what appear to be wrapped packages. Four spotlights go on and off between the columns and the paintings without any discernible logic. Two oversized moths Mal 1 and 2 (2024) cling to a wall and the ceiling. Nothing is particularly remarkable, in other words. And yet, the effect is startling.

Infinite is the possibility to include more elements as the radiators, spotlights, and frayed wires extend the exhibition beyond the conventional art object. The experience of occupying a place in a finite extended space is withdrawn from my sensibility, giving way to a sensation of intensity as the composition of Pedan’s elements first blocks thought and then causes a curious cerebral activation. The cold and sober office space aesthetics of Columns/Chapters 2 and 3 (2024) is interrupted by red and dark blue glass shelves bending, melting, and expanding under their own weight. The glass is pierced half a meter above the red shelf in one column, and half a meter below the shelf on the other, a few frayed electrical wires peeking out. The warm opaqueness of the material gives the sensation of standing in front of the beating heart of Forming the Culture of a Dormant Brain. Something seems to be alive within the glass, which resonates with the moths above my head but collides with the office space look of the columns themselves and radiators and the electric wires that operate with sterile building or construction site aesthetics. In further contrast, the blue and grey striped paintings and their wrapped packages point to artistic craftsmanship. Here, the living hand of the artist is present. It is a curiously effective composition.

The playfulness of the exhibition gives it its power. I keep looking over my shoulder, trying to figure it out and to offer an account to myself of what I am perceiving. To little avail. Looking at the emergency exit, the fire alarm and the electrical installations, I wonder what I am to include in my attempt to synthesise my perceptions. By merging incongruent objects, different aesthetical regimes, and paintings without a narrative thread to unravel, Pedan forces intensity to the surface of the perceptible, alters my sensibility and evokes thoughts and emotions previously only latently present. It is her abrupt merger of foreign elements and forms that produces the new in me.

Emotionally, intensity is transferred from the experience of the artist to the spectator by five ambiguous photographs of Columns/Chapters that, on the surface of things, do not tell much. Depicting grey winter scenes of wet snow, trees, muddy grass, walking paths, benches, and litter bins in a familiar yet nondescript Stockholm city park, they hit me with the incessant gloom of Swedish normality and the coming of a soul-wrenching winter. But they also, to my surprise, evoke a blunt contrast to the artist’s place of birth. Born in 1986 in now heavily bombed Kharkiv, Pedan moved to Sweden at a young age. Even though the word ‘Ukraine’ is nowhere in the exhibition, I juxtapose the prevalent images of war-torn Ukraine with the safe tranquillity of a Swedish winter. The force of violence reduce the indistinct photographs to a dichotomy between everyday life here and death and havoc there.

 Ksenia Pedan, Forming the Culture of a Dormant Brain, 2024. Installation view, Bonniers Konsthall.

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Ukrainian-born, Pedan’s work is bound to be read through the lens of the war, but projecting something that is not there in a photograph is a violent act. In defence, my reading can be justified by an interview Pedan gave on Swedish Radio a few days after the exhibition opened.[1] “I was”, she says, “in a difficult emotional place and sought comfort in my art”. Not living in Ukraine, however, Pedan does not want to address the war directly. “I do not want to represent something that people in my native country or people that have fled experience differently. […] Instead, I work with sorrow on a more universal level.” The photographs in the exhibition, she goes on, are like “windows” to something else. Something, I infer, other than the war. What is at stake for Pedan, it would then seem, is a manner of tackling the emotional hollowness of the Russo-Ukrainian war implicitly, a process where abstraction and ambiguity become subtle acts of resistance against war’s reductive and death-bound logic. For the artist, and for spectators by the traces perhaps left in her works.

Ksenia Pedan, Forming the Culture of a Dormant Brain, 2024. Installation view, Bonniers Konsthall.

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

If the photographs activate an emotional and, finally, political trajectory, then the thinking brain is awoken through the play of Pedan’s unexpected elements. The clash between the incongruent and infinite elements in composition brings out the intensity underlying the visible, the sensible, and the extensity of the room. The intensity produced gives us that which is to be sensed. As such, the exhibition works by confronting the spectator, it musters its playful powers to form a counterculture to a contemporary dormant brain. Ukraine operates as an emotional horizon against which this is played out. War grinds down ambiguity and sensibility, standing in this intense exhibition space means being forced in the opposite, rather frustrating, direction, where one has to think and feel for oneself. Forming the Culture of a Dormant Brain is, in the best sense of the word, a truly annoying exhibition.

Emet Brulin is a contributing editor to the Swedish art journal Paletten, and regularly writes art criticism for the newspaper Expressen and the Nordic journal of contemporary art Kunstkritikk.

[1] https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/konst-som-sorgearbete-for-ukrainskfodda-ksenia-pedan