Tremulations
Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm
Dates: 26 November 2024 - 12 February 2025
Curators: Jacqui Davies & Daniel Birnbaum
This exhibition presents echoes and reflections. The cinematic interventions by Jacqui Davies are interpretations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s “Nine Rules of Tremulation” and contain traces and “flashbacks" from an exhibition of artworks and archival material that she curated with Daniel Birnbaum for Swedenborg House, London, in 2023. Sixteen voices recite literary passages inspired by the Swedish visionary’s writings, so full of mirror–images and simulacra.
An Exhibition curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies at the library of the Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, in collaboration with the Swedish Academy
Tremulations is an exhibition that takes Emanuel Swedenborg’s cosmology as its point of departure. In his 1719 manuscript On Tremulation, he describes our world as consisting fundamentally of vibrations. Everything oscillates, even large object such as buildings or entire cities. Our bodies tremble like strings on a violin.
In 2023, Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies organized an exhibition at London’s Swedenborg House which juxtaposed objects and documents from the Swedenborg Society’s archives with works of art and films by artists such as Tony Cokes, Mark Leckey and Meret Oppenheim. At the Royal Academy of Art’s library in Stockholm, that exhibition reappears like a ghost. Fragments from the remote site surface like evasive dream images.
Reflections, shadows, echoes and replicas are important themes in the show, as are methods of transmissions. An emphasis on the multisensory agency of things – artworks as well as technical artefacts – creates spaces of reflection and ambience that rid our thinking of the obsession with the historically overemphasized relationship between a perceiving subject and a known object. Other equally productive relationships between agents – synthetic or organic – can emerge. A case in point: Swedenborg’s inner own ear bones, the show’s intricate centrepiece, seems to inhabit an ambiguous space between subject and objec
Tremulations has an acoustic dimension. Swedenborgian echoes in world literature emerge like whispers in the twilight of the library. The literary fragments have been selected in collaboration with Anna-Karin Palm and Anders Olsson, both members of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee.​
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