Anneli Holmstrom: The Skinny Showcase

Anneli Holmstrom is a visual artist, currently based between Lisbon and Edinburgh. Her work features a cross-disciplinary approach that explores the potential and limitations of materials to consider notions of the self. Whether merging paint with other plastic media or performance, her work values the materiality of creation and does not attempt to conceal the hand of its maker – granting viewers the opportunity to intimately explore personal narratives through the work and the spaces they inhabit.

Through this approach, her work seeks to move between image and object, inhabiting a world where the private and public, the pictorial and material territories become gradually enmeshed. Like the sensibility of folk art, her practice approaches materials that can infer a sense of proximity between object and maker; embracing a DIY aesthetic - where a sense of esoteric secrecy and physical closeness are used as allegory for private and internal perspectives.

-}}}}}} : {{{+}}} is the title of Anneli Holmstrom’s first UK solo show, presented as part of Summerhall’s curated programmes and kindly supported by Creative Scotland’s Open Project Fund.

The exhibition centres upon two new bodies of work, -}}}}}} and {{{+}}}, which, when viewed in conjunction, aim to visualise and consider temporal dualities between absence and presence. The result is a multimedia exhibition that strives for a visual experience that develops the sense of moving between two distinct – but interlocked – psychological worlds.

In {{{+}}}, metaphors of presence are explored through temporal narratives that explore the portrait of a self ‘at one’ with its environmental surroundings. Specifically, this work is comprised of one installation and one film work, fusing weightless sculptural properties with meditative and romantic references to create a feeling of ‘wholeness’. The accompanying video, Levitation, was shot on a small island in Finland, accompanied by a voiceover, featuring commissioned texts by poet JL Williams; particle-physicist Alex Murphy; and philanthropist Fatimah Ashrif. The commissioned texts featured within the film for {{{+}}}, will include a transcript read in Swedish, utilising language as a tool for conveying a sense of displacement and landscape which is ‘other’.

Anneli Holmstrom : -}}}}}} : {{{+}}} from arts-news on Vimeo.

In -}}}}}}, themes of present time are mirrored through an inner world of absence, which, like its counterpart, consists of one video and an installation. As such, -}}}}}} strives for nostalgic descriptions where narratives of entropy, loss, longing, desire and memory are merged, drawing upon a range of imagery from empty fountains, death rituals and the sentiment of Fado music. The accompanying video, Flood, was shot in Lisbon and made use of the city’s unique backdrop to enhance notions of melancholic romanticism.

Like the Levitation video, the voiceover used draws upon three specially commissioned texts from poet Janette Ayachi; neuro-scientist David Carmel; and artist/comparative mythologist,Dr Louise Milne. As in the {{{+}}} film, this work continues to explore how language and site can create a sense of displaced landscape, with the commissioned texts read in Portuguese.

Anneli Holmström’s upcoming shows include SUMMA, at the RSA, and Method of Loci, at Galerie Amu in Prague.