Ann-Sofi Sidén

Ann-Sofi Sidén, born in 1962, is based in Stockholm and New York. During recent years she gained a prominent position in the international art context. Sidéns work revolves around themes like the human psyche and the mythology of the "self". Several of her works also calls into question our concept of control and observation and its antitheses. On December 2 opens "Warte mal!", a solo show at The Secession in Vienna, consisting of and interviews with prostitutes and miscellaneous video material from a Czech town close to the German boarder. The show ends January17, 2000. Currently Sidén is showing her solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin. Sidéns film "QM I think I call her QM" (1997) CO directed with Tony Gerber is also on show at Carneige International from the 4th of October to March 26 2000. De Appelt in Amsterdam is showing the same film and two other related video works at the exhibition "Fireworks" from November 12th to early January 2000. A solo show opens at South London Gallery Jan 14th-Feb 20th 2000, in London. Sidén is represented by Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm and Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin.

Robert Fleck is a freelance critic and curator based in France. He is currently the director of of the Post-Graduate at ERBAN-Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts, Nantes (France). Recently he curated the Centenial Exhibition of the Vienna Secession (1998) and co-curated Manifesta 2 (1998) with Maria Lind and Barbara Vanderlinden. He is currently working on projects such as BIG - International Biennial, Torino 2000; L'Ecole de Nantes, Lieu Unique, Nantes 2000 and Surfing the Millenium - Kunsthalle Wien (in co-operation with Paolo Herkenhoff, Maaretta Jaukkuri and Rosa Martinez), Vienna 2000.

This text was originally published in the English edition of the catalogue of the Venice Biennial pp. 182, La Biennale di Venezia 48a Esposizione Internazionale d´Arte, dAPERTutto.

Ann-Sofie Sidén, "Who told the chambermaid". From Venice Biennale 1999. Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake.

The video installation Who Told the Chambermaid? manages to transform one's experience of the entire museum apparatus at first glance, both in the case of the viewer's visual apparatus and in the museum¥s organizational exhibitive structure. The thematization of hidden infrastructures and power relationships inside an apparently 'neutral' exhibition space has been one of art's greatest ambitions in the last few years. In it one can see, in all its entirety, a contribution to the unmasking of power mechanisms. Ann-Sofi Sidén's work deals with this theme, predominantly interpreting it, however, in the sense of transforming the aspect of 'institutional-criticism' into a rigid formal space in relation to the explosive psychic contents which really interest her. Sidén's work pushes institutional criticism to the extreme, up to the point where the viewer is able to concretely experience madness. More than in the artist´s typical formal security, it is in this inscription of psychic-borderline situations of social reality that the great potential of Sidén finds its basis.

Visitors discover Who Told the Chambermaid? in two phases. Firstly they see video surveillance monitors in the exhibition rooms, making them involuntarily spy on various hotel rooms. The monitors appear, at first glance, to be 'ready-made' surveillance. There are probably already other examples found in art over the last few years, but this aspect only superficially concerns the artist. At the end of the museum visit, visitors come to a room in which video images from hotel rooms flood in. Seventeen monitors with black-and-white videos, installed on supports between piles of washing, constitute the perverse surveillance of the hotel quests, devised - as the title of the work suggests - by a chambermaid in one of the city's many hotels.

This is already a strong metaphor for surveillance and the 'control society' Deleuze speaks about. However, the power of Ann-Sofi Sidén consists of psychically charging this type of mechanism and freeing it from all narrative. On the wall containing the monitors are precise scenic passages analogous with Pollock's all-over between each screen. This introduces a cinematic distance to the work which brings to mind Pasolini's free indirect discourse. In fact Sidén comes from Swedish underground cinema rather than figurative art. The video, apparently showing images in actual time, in reality involves a fictional discontinuity in that the hotel guests being observed are asked for their approval and are therefore in a false Candid Camera situation. With this intermediate solution, with the black-and-white images and the elaboration of the time factor, one feels oneself transported into the semi-suggestive atmosphere of one of Vito Acconi's first video works. Finally, the artist implicitly turns the situation on its head, and in the place of a moralistic sentence she creates an abstract portrait of an anonymous woman in whom it is possible to recognize, in analogy with other films and previous installations, a kind of alter ego of SidÈn. Her shocking work induces the viewer to think of a negative feminist heroine who is trying to assume control of the objective social situation whilst accepting schizophrenia. This subterranean and uninterrupted theme of Ann-Sofi Sidén and her psychic energies are mode perceptible in a visual and not literary way. Therefore one can interpret Who Told the Chambermaid? as an experimental film, regardless of its psychic contents, distributed over numerous monitors and using the medium of video installation to represent time and all its psychic intervals.