ANN-SOFI SIDEN
11.20.04-03.13.05 Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Ann-Sofi Sidén has long worked within the fields of paranoia, of control and surveillance. Her latest video 3 MPH (Horse to Rocket), 2002/2003, is set apart from from the rest of her solo exhibition at the Moderna Museet. In it, the artist rides a white horse slowly, like a lonesome cowboy (hat and all), all the way across Texas. Her destination is the NASA Ground Control center, and the video chronicles her encounters with the people she meets during the three-week journey. The multi-projection installation moves from right to left, and the images are intercut with meticulous precision. It is a work that possesses both beauty and meaning, and as in another recent video, Warte Mal!, 1999—a documentary about a brothel on the border between Germany and the Czech Republic (not shown in the exhibition)—it seems as if Sidén has progressed from making art about life to making life art. For people who find this trajectory worrisome, the basement of the Moderna Museet offers a chance to reconnoiter with the Queen of Mud (or QM). The subterranean space has been turned into the lair of this muddy, naked figure—humanoid but not quite human, with its simian features and lizard-like movements—who, in a series of works dating back over about fifteen years, has embodied Sidén's conception of the subversive forces of the id. With the new installation QM Museum, 2004, a kind of retrospective within a retrospective, this mid-career exhibition offers the best opportunity yet to fully enter the suggestive world of Sidén's longtime alter ego.