Galerie ADLER is presenting the young Berlin artist Emeli Theander
(*1984 Göteborg, Sweden) in her first gallery exhibition!
The
painter and street artist Emeli Theander continues to follow traces of
outsiders and freaks, diving into worlds inhabited by ghosts. What
connects these figures is their existence at the margins of modern
imagination
For this first solo show Emeli Theander is dealing
with the belief in the Gastkramad. This old Nordic folk-belief
describes a special behaviour of ghosts which perhaps could have
serious consequences also for the living. According to this
folk-belief ghosts are allowed to leave their graves between midnight
and sunrise. However, when surprised by morning dawn, they could not
move any more, but they still were remaining invisible for humans. In
case a human being happened to touch one of the ghosts in this state,
he was afflicted by more or less serious illness. Today the term
Gastkramad still is being used to describe something which is weirdly
thrilling.
Emeli Theander is engaged with the spirit worlds of
different cultures. But the question of whether ghosts exist, for
whatever reason, stuck between this or another world, or whether they
are mere products of our imagination, is not one Theander's work seeks
to answer. Real or not, her interest lies in their poetic potential,
as catalysts for imaginative scenarios. Thus in the actual process of
painting, ghosts become metaphors, for mediators between the realm of
the real and the imagined or even for the space ‘in-between’ they
inhabit. The continuity of referring to spheres at the margin of or
between worlds shows a strong fascination for ephemeral states in
which vagueness dominates over fixed meanings.
Surprisingly
the paintings themselves are detailed, like careful visual reports of
scenes actually observed. The tension of ambiguity the paintings
radiate might derive from the interaction between different layers
unfolded in each picture. Ghosts are depicted as subjects directed
towards the viewer, in the background unidentifiable ghosts make their
appearance – even ghosts are haunted by ghosts.
Many of the
figures in the paintings for this exhibition are inspired by Korean
myths, ghost stories and other findings, like photographs left behind
in abandoned houses. The photographs are fragmentary lost memories
without a concrete connection point for a random person. What remains
is a vague feeling of past situations or the pace of change itself. In
using them as a source of inspiration in her paintings, the artist
weaves a net of meanings around these fragments and connects them to
the notion of ghosts as existences in-between. Women and girls with
long hair, Korean pre-modern costumes or the connection between birds
and shamans are all worked into the fabric of Theander’s compositions.
The attempt to decipher her paintings leaves a lot of open questions
and maybe only one certainty – that in creating layers of meaning and
focusing on shifting processes between them, theander is mediating
herself, between ghosts and humans, and between imaginative scenarios
and her paintings.
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