The Apartment
Projects
Fia Backstrom, Pottery and Poetry. Nov. – Feb., 2009
The Apartment is pleased to present Pottery and Poetry by Fia Backström.
Pottery and Poetry attempts to imagine possible spaces and gestures for resistance in a bourgeois, domestic setting. The project includes a prolific production of recent ceramics and a narration, which will be rendered live during the opening reception. New York based Swedish artist Fia Backström is interested in questions on the construction of subjectivity, agency and the social interrelations of images, as seen through the shifting faces of politics, marketing and propaganda. Mimetic of its situation, her practice underlines the parameters of format and the logic of display.
In Pottery and Poetry, Backström puts herself in the role of a suburban housewife of the 1950s. This was a time when Brutalist architecture emerged, with its raw exterior surfaces recalling the trauma and defense structures of the war. At this same moment the United Nations (1945) was created in an atmosphere of light-blue forgetting, celebrating our new found “unitedness” and faith in peace. The optimism for the future, with standards of progression, its rhetoric not yet laden with the public protest movements of the 1960s and it’s motivation from civil inequality, yet fresh from the catastrophe of WWII. This arena for defiance, for a tentative non-articulate NO, is set in a fictionary-past of intimate domesticity, where the tool for a voice is pottery and poetry. The pots are used as screens with scratched, dated, fragmented words on their sheared surfaces. By setting this time-travel before -68, Backström evades a nostalgic, cliched view of our pre-conceived spaces for protest. This covert sci-fi strategy may be connected to our contemporary possible paths for engagement.
Fia Backström has had numerous recent exhibitions including Whitney Biennial, White Columns, NY, Wilkinson Gallery, London and United Nations Plaza, Berlin, and has had texts published in magazines such as Pacemaker, North Drive Press and Art on Paper.
We are proud to present Fia Backström in collaboration with The Western Front where she will be giving an artist talk at 5pm and a performance at 7pm on Sat, Nov 29th.
Please join us for an opening reception for Pottery and Poetry Fri, Nov 28th, from 7-10pm. The exhibition will be available for view by appointment through February 2009.
