Sophie Tottie

Sophie Tottie is an artist whose media include painting, video, photography, and drawing. She has received a number of grants and artist residencies, including the International Studio Program in New York (1994-1995), the Elisabeth Foundation (1996-97), I.A.S.P.I.S in Stockholm (1998), and, most recently, the DAAD artist grant in Berlin (2000-2001). Her work examines existential subjects with political and historical resonances, and often situates itself at the intersection between the individual and larger structural systems. Her work was most recently shown at Galleri Andreas Brändström in Stockholm and in " Mirror's Edge," an exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden. After residing for several years in New York, Sophie Tottie is currently living and working in Stockholm.

Mats Stjernstedt is an art critic at Aftonbladet and a freelance writer and curator.

Click on picture to see
"Heroes of the Brain"
in real video fromat

Click on picture to see
an excerpt from "Emotion"
in real video fromat

"Still Stalling" sound file in real audio format

Mats Stjernstedt (MS): After seeing your videos "Heroes of the Brain" (1998)
and "Emotion" (1997), and thinking about them in relation to your other works
and installations, such as "Welcome to the Earth" (shown at Stockholm's
Historiska Museet as part of the exhibition series Arkipelag, 1998) and "Pictures
for the Chief Electrician" (Rooseum, 1996 and New York, 1995), there are four
aspects that I would be interested in discussing here. They are: the relation
between the works' temporal and spatial dimensions; the relation between text
(in the form of voice-overs in your videos) and image (video, photography,
painting, drawing, etc.); the element of fiction to be weighed somehow against
reality; and the position you adopt in a purely formal sense.

We can pick out time as an important aspect of art in the '90s, where
temporality has come to sweep aside the spatial questions that artworks had
addressed earlier. You combine these two dimensions in your works in an
interesting way. The example I'd like to discuss is "Welcome to the Earth,
" where the two dimensions more or less seem to lay the ground for each other.
How do you think about your methodology, where you combine, for example, a
painting with a video and sound installation?

Sophie Tottie (ST): To a large extent, my work is based on existential issues
with political and historical points of reference. Initially, I found that painting's
preoccupation with the surface and its various possibilities makes it the most
interesting medium for dealing with these themes. My pieces develop in different
directions depending on the form of the source material. Some of the paintings
contain text, some contain videos, some contain drawings. Some of the drawings
are made of photographs, and so on. The combination of painting, sound, still
and and moving images also increases the chance of confronting and including
the viewer in the work. All the videos I've made thus far have been based on
textual material, and videos have become a way of dealing with written or spoken
material in conjunction with an image.

In a way that is often deceptive, the electronic image requires a longer viewing
time (we tend to forget that this is something a painting, too, would benefit from).
In certain works, I have chosen to confront the static image (painting, drawing,
photography) with the visual disappearance that constitutes electronic images.
The precise combination chosen depends on the questions posed by the material
and is specific to each work.

In the exhibition "Welcome to Earth," one of the driving forces behind my works
was the human desire to transgress physical and psychic limitations. In "Koloss"
("Colossus"), the point of departure was to use images of a running track from
Antiquity as material for the drawing. I then added a physically unwieldy
construction, without beginning or end, that the viewer had to move around.
In "Kabin" ("Cabin"), the story behind the making of that same running track was
the source of the material (according to myth, the length of the track was the
distance that the demigod Hercules could run while he held his breath), together
with the text "As Far As You Can Run While Holding Your Breath" painted
repeatedly on the inside of a closed frame. In the video "Heroes of the Brain,
" a cinemascope-like monochrome painting was pitted against a video.

On a purely physical level, the viewer was inside the work when he/she stood in
front of the painting and watched the video. To be able to grasp the sometimes
fragmented video images, where a barely visible man is telling how, under very
dire circumstances, he tries to read texts banned by the authorities, the viewer
was compelled to stay put a few moments before being able to move out of the
work. On the whole, it's the ideas behind the works that decide how they look,
but so does the question of how the viewer will confront the work. The viewer was
part of "Still Stalling" as well, like a film viewer would be. In this piece, there is a
surface which is in fact a projected slide showing a close-up of a road
(macadam-asphalt) and which, together with six blue lights, forms the visual
center of the piece. At the same time, the viewer hears a man describing two
different techniques for deliberately directing a plane toward the ground.

Another clear example of the combination of painting, sound, and video is
"Emotion," a work where the viewer is surrounded not just by sound, but also
by a wall painting and a large painted title on the ceiling. The different parts
of the work -- the hand-painted bar code that runs around the room without
beginning or end, the show's title (made to look like a license plate), the sound
from a highway -- all connect to the voiceover on the video of someone trying
to deal with a disappearance.

MS: The strong connection between text and image is clear in your work and
it's something I'm interested in knowing more about. Do you write the texts?
In the cases where you do write your own texts, how do you see concepts such
as reality and fiction, and the possibility of letting them become entangled in
one another?

ST: The scripts used in the video films are either interviews with people I
searched out or texts that I found (taken from documentary programs on
television, documentary texts, and sometimes from fiction or semi-fiction books).
These texts are then edited. The editing aims to highlight the aspects that are
central to the video. It is important to me that some kind of "reality" be the point
of departure -- reality in the sense that we encounter people and stories by
(or about) people that have a political or historical dimension. Of course,
reality and fiction get mixed up as soon as someone tries to tell a story.
In my video "Terroristen" ("The Terrorist"), this was one of the issues dealt
with. But the question of how fiction and reality interact is often secondary
to the specific issues addressed when the work itself becomes the subject
and focuses on one or several aspects of the source material.

MS: The video "Heroes of the Brain" (1998) gives us a sense of a society
where the individual is repressed. In your work you often come back to the
rhetoric and representation of both power and resistance, and to the individuals
for whom this repression has real consequences, either because they are
forced to flee from it, or because, like the terrorist that you discuss, they
become like single-celled organisms operating subversively against the
societal body. Do you see a similarity between artistic practice and
propagating political utopias?

ST: No. Artistic practice, as reflected in my work until now, is about different
ways of trying to handle, to understand, and to confront the effects of
political utopias.

MS: Through his pavilions with glass panes of different opacity, an artist
like Dan Graham shows that the ability to see and be seen through buildings
is one of the cornerstones of the language of power, that minimal forms can
accommodate an open aggression. You have been interested in the aesthetics
of public spaces and in the language of architecture. You've referred to the
open spaces of urban planning ("Bloody Flyovers," 1997) and to hermetic,
enclosed contraptions, such as airplane cabins ("Stalling," 1997).
Can you comment on this?

ST: "Stalling," which was shown at Lehmann Maupin in New York, was made
of two constructed stainless steel walls that sealed off two of the windows
from the inside. In the shallow but tall and wide space that was visible from
the street, the passers-by saw the steel walls lit up by fluorescent tubes.
In the middle of each window frame there was a transparency that cast its
shadow on the steel. One idea was to emphasize both the hermetically
sealed steel wall and the photographs' representation of the everydayness
of the flight cabins and their relation to geographical (and partly utopian)
destinations. By combining what represents security (well-sealed airplanes
and walls) and what represents the excluded (the areas closed off by safety
bolts), I wanted to bring attention to the degree of exclusion that any
enclosure necessarily creates. The work does not come to a conclusion
about the value of these kinds of technical achievements, but constitutes
a possible visual result of the utopias that have given us skyscrapers and planes.

"Bloody Flyovers," shown for the first time at the Museo Regional in
Guadelajara, Mexico, focuses on events that are often not visible. The
work's starting point was the public square, but by no means are all 40
oval photographs (inkjet prints on vellum and vinyl, actually) of public
squares. As a rule, the images are not openly aggressive either. It's
more that they try to convey a sense of the charged areas and liminal
spaces that memory and knowledge constitute in relation to real places
and squares -- in other words, in the surfaces that we occupy in life.
(It's interesting that, in American English, the word "flyover" has lost its
British sense of "viaduct" or "overpass." After the Vietnam war, the word
came to signify "reconnaissance for bombing purposes".) The 40 relatively
small images that make up the piece are installed like "window stoppers" on
walls or windows. There is a physically abstract quality in that, at a distance,
the images become dots that mark the room's surface in relation to the viewer.
Only at close range do the photographs reveal their stance concerning the
spaces that they represent. Incidentally, the fact that the moon has no walls
was a thought that struck me during the making of "Bloody Flyovers." The
built wall, like the utopian image of the moon, is a construction that aims to
protect but also to change our lives as we live them now.