The demonstrations on Tiananmen Square, the release of Nelson Mandela and the burning Twin Towers are brought together in Contemporary Patterns, a drapery for the auditorium of the Swedish Air Force Museum in Linköping. The woven curtain offers a fragmented panorama over the last decades of news flow. We meet the men and women of world politics as well as ordinary people, such as the East German border guard whose leap over the barbed wire to the West in the early 60's was captured by an attentive photographer. Today, most of us can identify the pictures, but the passage of time is relentless and it will not be long before some of them have been forgotten.
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World events are in the drapery connected to local. The dark streak that flows through the composition draws its shape from the nearby river Svartån, seen from above. The images and the abstract-patterned fields invoke correspondingly an aerial photographer’s representation of the landscape, with sharply drawn fields and forest areas laid out like a patchwork quilt. An insert picture of workers on their way out from the Saab factory in Linköping strengthens the link to the local community. This combination of the global and local reflects today's world, geographically distant events are close to us, as they often have an impact on our economy and jobs. |
But at the same time that the world's elements are more closely connected to each other contexts become increasingly complex and difficult to review. Loyalties, hostility and threats in international politics and economy follow new and less stable patterns today than during the Cold War era. Here the geometric parts of the curtain which interleave the reproduced photographs are of particular importance. The regularly structured patterns allow them to be interpreted as a metaphor for how we organize and sort information, and - perhaps vainly – how we strive to create understandable context. Contemporary Patterns allows past and present to merge in a broad and embracing snapshot that by future viewers surely may be perceived as both typical of its time and elusive.
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