Anima Mundi - Requiem for a Vanishing. Exhibit by Gustaf Broms
It’s a rare thing to find a space where you can just park your body and let your spirit(s) spill out, stimulated by the intensity and resonance of the room. I found myself returning day after day, to sit on the bench by the suspended branch, the central piece marking out the performance area. Watching Broms movements and actions which stirred and animated the things around him, none of which were lifeless. As the sound from the speakers turned musical and rhythmical for a moment I was sure the suspended mirror yoke started to bounce with extra fervor. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my face in the mirror had been replaced the next time it swung around, it was already becoming hard to recognize. Such is the spell of that room, that one remembers the lack of distinction, the lack of self. Yet belonging.
The photographs on the wall which greets you first as you enter reminds me of the beauty that only nature possesses. Where words like grotesque and morbid become useless because the truth of it all transcends. The wildness of it resists labels and genre. They depict death and decay, growth and abundance, animate and inanimate in playful compositions, which utilizes Broms own body as the canvas. Some create patterns which feel symbolic yet undefinable.
Deeper into the room, past the performance, the four screens showing video are located. Yet the audio and light from the film permeate the entire room. Slivers of projected film spill over into the performance area, as nothing in this room is truly contained. (Only the room itself is a sealed barrier to the world outside it, enchanted with the glamour of seeming small on the outside but vast once you enter.) The four screens surround a circular bench and fully immerse you in the film from different points of view, sometimes circling around you like a diorama, other times displaying different takes on the same theme. It’s hypnotic and dreamy, with the same qualities as the photographs, but with more variation and a hint of narrative or at least circular progression. It doesn’t matter at which point you enter the film, your presence is all that counts. When the themes of the film most clearly juxtaposes humankind’s attempted mastery over nature with the vitality that is lost in that process it’s at its most genuinely disturbing, but never to the point were it disrupts the immersion. The act of measuring skulls, like the “race biologists” did not very long ago, recurs throughout the film in ways which perfectly illustrates the futile ugliness of the practice. But most of all the film is wild, perplexing beauty and a melting away of barriers between human and non human, between life and death.
I already long to return to that room. To melt again into the moss of the forest and the dirt beneath the city. With the bones and the trees. To perceive my face in the dark suspended mirror as it gradually fades more and more with each turn. Feeling at the same time so intoxicatingly present.
The exhibit is showing between the 17th to the 25th of March 2022 in Benhuset, Katarina Östra Kyrkogårdsgränd, Stockholm.
Gustaf Broms website: http://www.orgchaosmik.org/
