Bella Rune

Suspended Animation
May 14 - September 27 2020

It is with great pleasure that Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum presents Bella Rune’s exhibition Suspended Animation during the summer season of 2020. The exhibition title is easily associated with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The whole world seems to be frozen still. While the link to the pandemic is a coincidence, it is precisely something about this type of frozen state that the exhibition tries to capture: an elastic moment where it is unclear what is what, where opposites meet and contrasts are balanced.

Suspended Animation is not about reviving something dormant,but about activating the potential in what is held in abeyance. Bella Rune’s exhibition makes us conscious of the tension that exists in the studio between Carl Eldh’s myriad sculptures of people, fixed as they are in a moment of emotion and movement. Her sculptures are also balancing acts, albeit of a different type.

Where Carl Eldh captures human relations, Bella Rune is concerned with interconnected fields of power, by an interplay between different dimensions. Petite Titan in Tension - Inferno, created specifically for this exhibition, is literally based on one of the arms in Eldh’s Strindberg Monument. It has been scanned and 3D printed in miniature in several iterations, which are all linked together by a system of threads.

Thread itself is central to Bella Rune’s artistic practice. She regularly relates to weaving in her work. Thread can be found in Crossing (Korsning), in which several weaving frames are joined together in a floating form, as well as in her hanging sculptures of colored mohair yarn that occupy Carl Eldh’s studio space. This weaving together of different threads also has a connection to the “web” of the digital world, not in the least through the artist’s site-specific work in augmented reality, which is accessible to the museum’s visitors through the mobile app Bella Runes Portal.

Bella Rune likes to see her works as amplifiers of conditions in the sites where she exhibits. Her sculptures draw attention to the fragile and serious elements in Carl Eldh’s work and reveals the duality of reality. In beautiful harmony, both artists tells us something about the human condition that words are powerless to explain.

Bella Rune(born 1971 in Stockholm) attended Chelsea College of Arts in London and Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. Since her debut in 1998, she has participated in a large number of exhibitions in Europe, China, and the United States. Her solo shows include XYZ, Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm (2019); Vertical Network Performance, Market Art Fair, Stockholm (2018); and Impact Analysis, Stadsskogen (The City Forest), Uppsala (2015). She has participated in biennials and group exhibitions such as Art Encounters Biennial 2019, Timisoara, Romania (2019); Every Miracle Requires a Sacrifice – work done in Västerås, Västerås Art Museum (2020); Interwowen, EMMA – Espo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2019); and Textile Subtexts, Malmö Art Museum (2017).

Bella Rune is a Professor of Fine Arts in Textilesat Konstfack in Stockholm. She has undertaken a series of collaborations, for example with the artist Jonas Nobel, director Jesper Kouthoofd, choreographer Malin Elgan, and the electronic music duo The Knife.

With the digital technology of augmented reality, Bella Rune has created immaterial sculptures for public spaces, most recently for Karlsgatan in Västerås (2020), and earlier for the Stockholm School of Economics (2016). Works occupying physical space include Loggia, her artistic design for Gävle Hospital (2014), as well as this year’s Training Camp for the Ability to Imagine at the primary school Sjöviksskolan in Årsta (in collaboration with Jonas Nobel).

Bella Rune’s work is in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg Museum of Art, and Malmö Art Museum. She has received grants such as the Iaspis’ International Grant, Tokyo Wonder Site (2009), and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s two-year grant (2008-09).

For more information about the artist, please see Galleri Magnus Karlsson.

In connection to the exhibition a bilingual catalog is produced with an essay by Art Critic and Professor in Art History Håkan Nilsson. An artist talk (in Swedish) between Bella Rune and Håkan Nilsson took place in the museum on June 11 at 6 pm.

See Current for exhibition reviews.

This exhibition is made possible through the support of the Swedish Arts Council, Pontus Bonnier, the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, the Royal Patriotic Society, Galleri Magnus Karlsson and the City of Stockholm.

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