The Fall / To become Material (2018), video loop.
Foto: Thomas Olsson
Amnesia /Untitled,(2017). Bronze, Photo: Valdermar Asp.
Text from the Exhibition catalog
Cia Kanthi´s installation: When do you come home? (2017-2022).
Bronze sculpture, video (loop), two large-format photographs, one photo sculpture.
Cia Kanthi describes sculpture as a medium peculiarly located at the juncture between stillness and motion, between time arrested and time passing. A small bronze head rests on a podium in Carl Eldh's large studio. The work Untitled/Amnesia is a casting of Kanthi's son's head before turning three years old and before the age when the ability to remember is fully developed in the human consciousness. A place later impossible to return to.
The installation shows two photographs, Killar med plankor/Guys with Boards (2020) from the port of Malmö, and Sea of Marmara (2020), the sea where east and west meet at the border between Europe and Asia. The installation links seas, movements, bodies, and the ways personal stories can be read as part of larger narratives. Along associative paths, Cia Kanthi examines the materials' ability to communicate with our memories, and to perceive hidden gaps, times, and places. Here she approaches a fluid relationship between the experience of home, origin, context, and the body as a carrier of these experiences.
In several works, Kanthi has examined museology, where she has approached the idea of the museum as a kind of home in itself, a place with power over our collective memories and histories. Next to the small bronze head in the large studio, the video work “The Fall / To become Material” is shown. In the work we see the artist walking in waist-high grass outside Malmö Art Museum to suddenly fall and disappear out of frame. The artist's body forms a trail in the swirling grass, but she herself is gone. Within the act of falling, her body within the work at once forms the material being archived and the disappearing.
The very act of collecting and archiving is described by the philosopher Jacques Derrida as "... an indomitable homesickness to return to the absolute beginning". The modern collection and the idea of the museum were both created in the 19th century and they were tasked with strengthening the notion of a nation and a common past. How do we relate to history and storytelling at a time when the idea of what constitutes "home" is more multifaceted and often holds more perspectives? What is contained in the silent darkness outside the archives, and outside of memory?
-Joanna Nordin, Museum chef
