A town without ghosts is a dead town

Galleri Image presents an exhibition with new works by the artist Erik Viklund, who has approached the city of Rome’s history and urban planning as well as older photographic interpretations of the city.

Presented here is a series of light boxes representing a kind of peculiar windows found in Rome’s public spaces. In Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847), the window is said to depict spiritual entry and escape, a transcendent dimension that can be considered a place of the sacred. In Erik Viklund’s pictures, they can also be seen as a representation of distance and longing. They reflect the gap that exists between the individual and the public, the difference between the outer reality and the dimension of life that is inaccessible to politics and authorities.

At the same time, the artist’s book “Gensides de siktbara” is being launched with images printed with travertino marble from the city’s nearby marble industry. In Rome, where the movements of life are squeezed between architectural remains from ancient times, the Etruscan period, the Middle Ages to the externalities of modern times, the visitor steps into a project planned and implemented by the fascist regime of the 1930s. But rather than trying to portray a specific place, a dialogue is initiated here with the city’s now and then.

In previous works, the artist has used the specific materials of places to dissolve the boundaries between the depicted place and its representation. In his previous publication Om han var (2018), he printed portraits of young men on found A4 paper from the urban space. In the exhibition Eftervärld (Konstnärshuset, Stockholm, 2021), a ten-year-long project about a house in Solna was manifested in a large-scale room installation with plywood boards and glass from the house itself.

The starting point for Erik Viklund’s visits to Rome in recent years has been some of the alleys, streets and squares that can be seen in the book Fotografernas Rom 1846-1878 (Thorvaldsens museum, 1978). The book’s photographers seem to have wanted to capture the meeting between the old and the new, the fixed and the ephemeral. Man in the shadow of history and history in the shadow of the world. Because of the time that has passed since they were taken, these old, brown-toned large-format photographs have themselves been turned into relics and therefore approach the very columns they depict. Today, neither the columns nor the photographs appear as the work of individuals, but of an era.

In Rome, Viklund has photographed people living in the shadow of the enormous monuments built by and for residents who have long since died. The portraits have then been embodied in marble, but not as solid sculptures, but as pictures in dusty white powder on black pages. The result is fleeting and fragile, a kind of anti-monument in marble that suggests finitude rather than eternity. Marble is a symbol of power but also of man’s quest for immortality. Perhaps Erik Viklund’s work can be seen as an attempt to undermine that relationship.

Galleri Image in Aarhus, Denmark, 2023-10-14 to 2023-12-17.

All documentation photos by Mikkel Høgh Kaldal

The artist’s book presented in the exhibition is produced with the support of The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Helge Ax:son Johnson’s foundation.

The exhibition is supported by The Augustinus Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, the Danish Arts Foundation, the Louis-Hansen Foundation and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.