Norrköping Art Museum, Norrköping
April 7th–August 19th, 2018
Text from Norrköping Art Museum, translated by Rejmyre Art Lab:
“Performing Labour takes its point of departure in the industrial village of Rejmyre in Östergötland. Here, forests and the mineral quartz have created the conditions for an industry that is one of the few glassworks still in operation in Sweden. To this village of approximately 900 inhabitants, artists Sissi Westerberg and Daniel Peltz have, over a ten-year period, invited artists from all over the world. The framework has been their own organization, Rejmyre Art Lab’s Centre for Peripheral Studies, with the site itself consistently at the center of the process.
The exhibition at Norrköping Art Museum has been developed in close collaboration with Daniel Peltz, who has led the artistic research project Performing Labour. Together with David Larsson and Sissi Westerberg, he presents works that reflect labor – through labor. Through Sissi Westerberg’s work, we encounter the invisible knowledge held by glassblowers, so intimately connected to the body through breathing. David Larsson focuses on the landscape as an economic precondition for industry, while Daniel Peltz weaves together seemingly disparate phenomena such as unemployed elephants in Burma, the situation of refugees in Sweden, and the working conditions of glassblowers at Rejmyre Glassworks. Together, they form a poetic and serious narrative about the human condition on earth – and the art of offering and taking refuge.”