Tremulations
Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm
Dates: 26 November 2024 - 12 February 2025
Curators: Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies
The Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm. Produced in collaboration with the Swedish Academy.
Tremulations is an exhibition that takes Emanuel Swedenborg’s cosmology as its point of departure. In his manuscript Om darrningar (On Tremulation), he describes our world as consisting fundamentally of vibrations. Everything oscillates. Our bodies tremble like strings on a violin.
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. Fragments from that 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 own inner-ear bones, the show’s intricate centrepiece, seems to inhabit an ambiguous space between subject and object.
Tremulations has literary and acoustic dimensions. Swedenborgian echoes in world literature emerge like whispers in the twilight of the library.
Text by: Etel Adnan, Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A. S. Byatt, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Gunnar Ekelöf, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Selma Lagerlöf, Gerard de Nerval, August Strindberg, D. T. Suzuki, Olga Tokarczuk, W. B. Yeats.
The literary fragments have been selected in collaboration with Anna-Karin Palm and Anders Olsson, both members of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee.