Gunvor Nelson
Antics Gallery, Stockholm
December 11, 2024 – January 25, 2025
A collection of gelatin silver prints lines the walls at the artist-run gallery Antics. At first glance, they feel familiar, even in their oddness. After all, this world has no shortage of portraits in the studio or of breasts in black and white. Long limbs stand out gracefully against a simple dark backdrop, and for eyes accustomed to screens, a gelatin silver print is a quiet pleasure.
A closer look however reveals their strangeness: prosthetic breasts held in front of actual ones, a skull painted flat, a headless torso that floats. A moment of misrecognition, too – is the figure wearing eyeliner or has that too been painted on? There is one photograph that stands out to me as particularly odd. The figure is turned to the side, arms and hands frozen in a stiff and unfamiliar gesture, legs obscured to the point of disappearance, with a streak of black paint where her nose used to be – a strange scoop out of the face.
It is here at Antics that these images are meeting an audience for the first time. The exhibition is the result of the combined efforts of many: Max Ronnersjö and Katarina Sylvan who run the gallery, Andreas Bertman in collaboration with Filmform, and Oona Nelson, Gunvor’s daughter. Andreas and Oona came across this collection of prints in a box while working with Gunvor’s archive, in the end selecting ten images to show. The edges are slightly bent, with notes and other subtle markings appearing here and there, imprints of touch from decades ago.
Interestingly, not much is known about these photographs. We know that they are photographic sketches for Nelson’s 1972 film Take Off, serving as a kind of pre-study or work material, and that they have never before been exhibited or written about. Nelson must have considered these prints important enough to save – precious enough to store in a box, at least – but those involved in putting this exhibition together do not think she would have considered these to be artworks.
This makes the show at Antics a rare opportunity. We get to see works by Nelson beyond her canonized films, and perhaps even more notably, we encounter still images rather than moving ones. Absent in this space are the filmic collages and avant-garde soundscapes that come together to create the distinct voice of her films. Furthermore, it offers a window into process itself, and without much information to frame the encounter. This grants the viewer an unusual degree of openness.
It is possible to do a close reading of these photographs as though they are finished works standing alone, because after all here they are, framed on a white wall. In a way this presents us with a real art school exercise – what is the work doing? Not what the artist wants it to be doing, not what we know about the artist, but what the work is (and isn’t) doing in front of us. Claude Cahun’s photographic self-portraits come to mind right away, which also play with symbols of fantasy like masks, dolls, and props all in relation to the body, though I wonder what Nelson would have thought of them. Viewed independently, I find the sketches quite different from Take Off. They have a much quieter feel, speaking more to a complex inner world than to a performance.
More rewarding however is to read these in relation to the film. On the opening evening of the exhibition the viewer had the opportunity to do both at once, as there was a screening of Take Off in its original 16mm format, a real play of light and shadow unfolding as its performer was beamed into the room. Take Off features a professional burlesque dancer, Ellion Ness, who named herself after the American Prohibition agent who tried to bring down Al Capone. It opens with an animation, continues into a striptease, and ends somewhere else entirely. Ness looks into the camera, dancing and undressing slowly with both glamour and playfulness. She is both product and producer of her own image.
About halfway through, the film takes a turn. Ness lifts her hair straight up and off her head with a delighted expression on her face, subverting expectations. The act of removing the wig triggers a cascade of unexpected movements: images start to intrude on each other in a complex layering that gets more and more chaotic as she removes her arms and legs to the rhythmic flashing of lights. In the end the body is liberated from its earthly constraints.
Taken together, the photographic sketches show how different Take Off is from Nelson’s other films. They suggest a kind of storyboarding: a plan laid out from the beginning, an interpersonal interaction traced, making the film’s structure fundamentally different and far more linear. The photographs themselves – and their presence here in an exhibition – together emphasize the breadth of Nelson’s practice, that at the heart of it was a way of thinking through other mediums as a part of thinking through moving images. Images, to her, did not stay in one place; she often used her own paintings and drawings as material within moving image, an intuitive reshuffling.
Another current exhibition of photographs that deserves a mention is Esse-Li Esselius at Gallery Steinsland Berliner, where similar threads can be felt. It too features photographs that remained archived in boxes until recently, originally made in the 70s but shown now for the first time – here, a series of self-portraits taken with a Polaroid SX-70. Esselius manipulated the photographs as they developed, placing them over an open flame which resulted in delicate and irregular fractures across the surface of the image and a dramatic sculptural effect on the object itself. The material here has split and spread, with patterns like orifices superimposed over the body. Here, too, we have an artist working with both still and moving image.
The exhibition at Antics holds special resonance given Nelson’s passing last month in Kristinehamn at the age of 93. It serves as a tribute to process and to synchronicity – between Gunvor and Ellion, between Max and Katarina at Antics, Andreas, and Oona, and among those who gathered for the opening, a mix of art students, film enthusiasts, and visitors from out of town. As an artist-run space it is a fitting setting for these works, given the sensitivity that they can bring to process and to material from the ground up. In this context the sketches feel especially at home. Tributes to Nelson have been circulating these past weeks, from the US where she lived for decades and also here in Sweden where she returned later in life. While much has been written about her pioneering contributions to the field, I am also glad to see an exhibition which brings forward works that live in-between, offering, in tandem with her canonized films, a very good goodbye.
Erika Råberg
Erika Råberg is an artist and curator originally from the US. She is the founder of the forthcoming publication series Working Title, which publishes conversations between artists here in Stockholm, and also hosts projects in her apartment as Occasional Gallery.