Konsthallen Engelska Magasinet, Rejmyre
April 18th–May 18th, 2025
Maps tell us something about the unknown. They give us an idea of what we can expect from a place, what we need to bring with us, what shoes we should wear, what challenges we may encounter there. Someone has experienced this physical or mental terrain before us, and, if we know how to read their markings, the unknown becomes less foreign.
Creating a map can also be a way to better understand and sort through what we already know, and to communicate it to others. How is a map created? Who is allowed to make a map, and what stories does it contain and exclude? Maps have always been more than just representations of geography – they are stories, systems, and tools for understanding and shaping the world. “Mapping” and working with different types of diagrams has a long history in artist practice. Re-orienteering explores the potential of the map as an artistic and philosophical object, a bridge between reality and imagination.
The exhibition features works by the Swedish artist Ida Rödén alongside the Lithuanian artists Arnas Ansakaitis, Giedrė Godienė, Nikolaus Gansterer and Sandra Kazlauskaitė (whose works are included in the recently publication Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education by Lina Michelkevičė and Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius (from which the exhibition draws part of its title). This book and other related publications will be available in the exhibition’s temporary library.
Visitors are invited to contribute to the exhibition by creating their own maps, on site in the gallery, and will also encounter local maps from the archives of the Rejmyre Historical Society. Through diagrams, cartographic experiments and new ways of visualizing spaces and ideas, the exhibition challenges us to re-see and re-navigate the world we thought we knew.