Dana Sederowsky will present three new works at the Hasselblad Center, all part of the extensive project SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS. The works are in the genre of video performance, and the artist alone appears in front of the camera.
Sederowsky has used the same rigorous system of rules in all of her video works since she began this project in 2006. The video camera is to be still and portray its object without cuts, for a maximum of ten minutes. The background should be monochrome. Sederowsky should only use her own body and only perform text she has written herself.
Within this set of rules she has used a mosaic of means in her attempts to understand how the voice and the face create meaning. Sederowsky’s own voice and face compose the main material for the work of art, and like language, take on its meaning through use.
There is no contradiction in Sederowsky’s works between the power of speech used to conceal and to reveal. The red lips and the striking eye shadow that mark the mouth and the gaze, as well as the swept-back hair all enhance the impression of the facial movements.
In the three new works, with the joint title HASSELBLAD ANNOUNCEMENTS, Sederowsky returns to the three aesthetic techniques that have characterized the series in its entirety to date: repetition, stuttering and self-appellation. All three methods contribute to making the meaning of what is actually said ambiguous. The facial expressions, like the words that are pronounced, shift and fragment.
In HASSELBLAD ANNOUNCEMENTS the viewer encounters the artist’s character, for instance, upside down, with closed eyes repeating the same short declaration about the situation, and unfaltering: “There is nothing behind me, there is no one in front of me.”
In another piece we see her at first miming a classical gesture for film photography, and then she gets caught stammering in the midst of pronouncing the phrase: “This is a still photograph.” In a third piece we see the face literally bang the camera, head on, maximizing an underlying tension that has been latent in all the previous works in the series.
Fredrik Svensk, art critic