"To approach, and to stay.
To try to be there for an other person, to understand, to support.
To never be able to. To always be on the outside.
And the risk of infection."

These are the words accompanying one of the videos (Attempt at Empathy, 2018, photo above) of Stockholm based artist Anna- Rasmusson (born 1983). She works with staging complex and complex emotional states close to our subconscious and often hard to render in words.  Performances, videos, collages and painting are her media for treating situations social science insist on working and articulating in language. Can she help us overcome the linguistic turn and its obvious limitations?

The four characters is the three videos we are exhibiting at SSE all deal with matters most of us can easily identify with in today´s state of mind. In I Rummage Your Kitchen on the big screen in the atrium the character is searching something: but what? Maybe they are looking for a solution? The truth? Evidence? A right answer?

We can see frustration, clumsiness and resignation but also determination and curiosity. What is going on in the kitchen?

Beyond the current pandemic and its de-socializing effects Rasmusson´s three works also bear relevance to phenomena tackled in work, on markets and the organizational reality of capitalism: responsibility, order and care.

It´s hard to believe but all three video works in this exhibition were made before the Covid-19 pandemic. The themes of the videos are extremely timely; during the past year we all had to expand our empathy, deal with frustration regarding facts and regulations and at the same time carry fear of sickness and death.

And we have all washed our hands like never before…

Anna-Karin Rasmusson is represented by Cecilia Hillström Gallery.

OCD/Pandemic (2020) by Anna-Karin Rasmusson, in the entrance hall at SSE.

All photos by Mikael Olsson

For more information contact Tinni Ernsjöö Rappe, tinni.rappe@hhs.se, 0708-366641