The Teenage Runner with Tim Habe

The Teenage Runner, 2018

Performance approx. 20 min, pigment print on cotton paper, reactive print on cotton voile, stairs, plant, glass, plant light

After a lecture by Karlsson Lundgren at an art institution in northern Sweden, someone in the audience initiated contact. The person, a collector, seemed to have a carefully selected collection of mainly American photo-based art with a queer approach – somewhat a surprising finding in this rural area. They initiated a dialogue and started a process of going through the art collection.

The Teenage Runner unfolds a specific fragment of a collection and draws parallels between different narratives that combine hazy memories, erotic sensations, scientific texts and poetry with philosophy. All of them lead back to a photograph by Arthur Tress, Teenage Runners (Band-Aid Fantasy) from 1976. The combination of voices from the collector, the photographer, the artist, the performers and others, becomes a way of reconstructing and re-visiting the memory of a single event and examines how an artwork has been transposed into a collection. Collecting can be an intimate act of lust and desire, an identity process, a method of addressing a need to belong, but primarily a means of creating a room of one’s own.

The Teenage Runner consists of five parts: The Collector, The Glade, The Stairs and Sensitiva. Together they form the stage set for a performance – The Teenage Runner, which will be performed on several occasions during the exhibition period.