UKS

On entering Arnell’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Scandinavia, expect a country-and-western style grandstand, silage, holograms, and horse love. Arnell’s exhibition centers on a new film starring a pack of adolescent girls in a stable, prompting questions of friendship, misfit, and normativity, fetishization and female empowerment. Instructed in a reality-show-like manner, the young girls method-act through stages of agitation, thriving on the Swedish artist’s own rural childhood trauma and her recent short-lived career as a porn film director: teens pulling hair, grand stallions being objectified, food fights, horse healing, and “explicit content” kissing. Archaic group dynamics of power and its misuse are pushed forward, lurking just below the surface of welfare society’s supposed safe-spaces and gender equality. In her film, these grim dynamics are coupled with a filmic gaze, hungry for popular entertainment: it’s an underlying rule here that someone’s got to be trashed.

Josefin Arnell (b. 1984) has recently presented work at venues including Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019); Lily Robert, Paris (2019); and Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018). An alum of Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Arnell is based in Amsterdam.