4 December 2021–20 March 2022
Monumental architecture, seismic waves and building blocks from imaginary worlds. The Gothenburg Museum of Art finishes the year with a large-format installation by Emanuel Röhss, in which moving images, audio and stage design transform the room.
In December, the exhibition by Emanuel Röhss, winner of the Stena Foundation Culture Scholarship for 2021 in visual art, will open at the Gothenburg Museum of Art. The exhibition features site-specific installations and an essay film which is shown to the public for the first time. The presentation at the Gothenburg Museum of Art is one of the most extensive projects that Emanuel Röhss has carried out for a separate exhibition. Frank Lloyd Wright’s mythical buildings in the architectural style of Mayan Revival in Los Angeles are explored, as well as the architecture from the tercentennial Jubilee Exhibition in Gothenburg in 1923.
Emanuel Röhss (b 1985) trained at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, the Valand Academy in Gothenburg, and the Royal College of Arts in London, where he took a master’s degree in Fine Arts. Presently he is active as an artist in Los Angeles. Röhss’ art is often site-specific and materials and media varia depending on the project. His works interweave imaginary settings and physical places, the past and the future, fiction and reality.
The Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture is an important institution in the cultural life of Gothenburg, which provides unique opportunities for artists to produce new works and increase their visibility. In conjunction with its 25th anniversary, culture scholarships have been awarded to three culture practitioners who each receive 300 000 SEK to stimulate their development. Since 1996, the Foundation has awarded 155 scholarships to further the training of talented people in art, music, theatre, dance, literature and scenography. Furthermore, the Foundation has supported many different projects in research and culture in Sweden.
A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the exhibition, including longer personal interviews and a plethora of visual material for each recipient of the culture scholarships. Short introductory films featuring all the scholars are shown in the exhibition and provide further in-depth knowledge about them.
The motivation is as follows:
The artist Emanuel Röhss
Emanuel Röhss investigates the ability of the room to create fiction by combining architecture, ornamentation and visual culture. The creative process takes place in the intersection between sculpture, installation and the moving image, but materials and media can vary depending on site-specific characteristics.
Decorative elements fetched from buildings or filmic sequences are reborn as stage design and rebuilt into new worlds. In ambiguous installations, the viewer’s experience of the surroundings changes, establishing a kind of no man’s land that contains both cultural memory and subconscious layers.
For an artistic production which transforms space, stretches the limits of perception and expands the field of artistic expression, Emanuel Röhss has been awarded the 2021 Scholarship from the Sten A Olsson Foundation for Research and Culture.
The recipients of the 2021 Stena Foundation Culture Scholarships are:
The soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan
The artist Emanuel Röhss
The actress and producer Alicia Vikander
Top Image: Videostill from Monster Dialectics, 2019-2021. Digital video, stereo sound 12 min 7 s. Courtesy of the artist.