2023
Custom-made signage in acrylic and LED light in 9 parts
Dimensions variable
Unique
We try to make sense of the world through the symbols around us. The piece, Pa develops from the experience of deciphering meaning in something that should be familiar and yet offers something oddly unplaceable, destabilizing reliable linguistic faculties. Language, as conscious thought in action, is difficult to feel. Paradoxically, it’s only when one is deprived of stability, whether that be one’s language or good health, that it can be recognized.
Pa is comprised of nine blue luminescent characters fabricated as commercial signage. It’s derived from a specific worldwide electronics brand, whose corporate identity greets the artist and others on their daily commute, as a glowing advertisement sitting high atop a residential building located on Stockholm’s south island. Displaced and with its corporate identity dismantled, the letters are scattered in various places in relation to the exhibition space, “like unmoored beacons for a place that is lost.” Writer and curator Natasha Marie Llorens likens the gesture of the piece to how the “capacity of language to signify is submerged in the human unconscious and is, therefore, fugitive.”
Photo credit:
Jean-Baptiste Béranger
Exhibition History
Dodge and/or Burn, Accelerator, Stockholm, 2023-2024Pa, Galleri Riis, Oslo, 2025