Laurie Anderson
Looking into a Mirror Sideways
01 Apr - 03 Sep 2023
Laurie Anderson, Exhibition view, with photo series Looking into a Mirror Sideways, 2023 Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet. Info: Self-portrait series from 1975.
Laurie Anderson & Hsin-Chien Huang, To the Moon, 2018 Virtual Reality installation, exhibition view. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Info: VR artwork created by artists Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang. To the Moon uses images and tropes from Greek mythology, literature, science, space, sci-fi, and politics to create an imaginary and fabulous new moon. During the 15-minute VR experience, the viewer is shot out from earth, walks on the surface of the moon, glides through space debris, flies through DNA skeletons and is lifted up the side and then tossed off of a lunar mountain.
Info: VR artwork created by artists Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang. To the Moon uses images and tropes from Greek mythology, literature, science, space, sci-fi, and politics to create an imaginary and fabulous new moon. During the 15-minute VR experience, the viewer is shot out from earth, walks on the surface of the moon, glides through space debris, flies through DNA skeletons and is lifted up the side and then tossed off of a lunar mountain.
Laurie Anderson, Exhibition view: ARK – The Ark and All the Animals, 2023 Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Laurie Anderson, Exhibition view, ARK, 2023 From "Scenes from the ARK", a work in progress commissioned by Manchester International Festival for fall 2024. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Laurie Anderson, Exhibition view with When You We're Hear, 2023 Microphones, amplifier, wooden base
Dedicated to Nikola Tesla. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Dedicated to Nikola Tesla. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Laurie Anderson, Exhibition view, 2023 Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Laurie Anderson, Exhibition view with I'll Be Your Mirror, 2023 Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Laurie Anderson, Exhibition view, 2023 To the left: digital video Hidden Inside Mountains (2005).To the right: sitepecific drawing (2023)
Laurie Anderson & Hsin-Chien Huang, To the Moon, 2018 Virtual Reality installation, exhibition view. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Info: VR artwork created by artists Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang. To the Moon uses images and tropes from Greek mythology, literature, science, space, sci-fi, and politics to create an imaginary and fabulous new moon. During the 15-minute VR experience, the viewer is shot out from earth, walks on the surface of the moon, glides through space debris, flies through DNA skeletons and is lifted up the side and then tossed off of a lunar mountain.
Info: VR artwork created by artists Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang. To the Moon uses images and tropes from Greek mythology, literature, science, space, sci-fi, and politics to create an imaginary and fabulous new moon. During the 15-minute VR experience, the viewer is shot out from earth, walks on the surface of the moon, glides through space debris, flies through DNA skeletons and is lifted up the side and then tossed off of a lunar mountain.
Laurie Anderson, ARK – Commotion, 2023 Site specific drawing. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet
Artist, performer, composer, filmmaker and writer, Laurie Anderson’s boundary defying work has elevated her to legendary status among the pioneers of American avant-garde art, experimental music and independent culture. Storytelling, listening and language are at the very core of her art.
Laurie Anderson is a legendary figure within US avant-garde art, experimental music, and independent culture. Equal parts performer, author, composer, activist, and filmmaker, her work cuts through genres. She achieved her international breakthrough as a pioneer of electronic music. Today she works at the cutting edge of new arts technologies, like VR and AI – but is just as likely to employ timeless expressions like voice, painting, or charcoal drawings.
The different parts of Laurie Anderson’s multifaceted production form a tapestry of storytelling that weaves together observations around the human condition, the dreams of nations, the transient now, as well as dystopian visions of the future. The address is direct but follows dream logic, making the everyday strange and wondersome, awakening existential questions: Where are we? What is time? Who owns the story?
This exhibition combines new site-specific productions with selections from the artist’s oeuvre, including performance, photography, and video. In several works Anderson explores issues of subject and of identity, the roles we take and are given, for example, via the artist’s Swedish-born paternal grandfather, Axel Efraim Anderson (1881–1963).
In what is Anderson’s largest solo exhibition to date in Europe, visitors are treated to a narrative on the nature of time, space and existence. A representative selection of the artist’s works from the 1970s up to the present day is complemented with brand new, site-specific productions: conceptual art, performance, innovative musical instruments, compositions, stage shows, as well as activist art and political art. The exhibition serves as a forum for both physical materials and techniques – painting, sculpture, analogue photography, sound tapes and film strips – and new digital worlds, such as virtual reality.
Laurie Anderson, born in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, in 1947 has Swedish ancestry on her father’s side. Her grandfather hailed from Dalsland.
Curator: Lena Essling
Laurie Anderson is a legendary figure within US avant-garde art, experimental music, and independent culture. Equal parts performer, author, composer, activist, and filmmaker, her work cuts through genres. She achieved her international breakthrough as a pioneer of electronic music. Today she works at the cutting edge of new arts technologies, like VR and AI – but is just as likely to employ timeless expressions like voice, painting, or charcoal drawings.
The different parts of Laurie Anderson’s multifaceted production form a tapestry of storytelling that weaves together observations around the human condition, the dreams of nations, the transient now, as well as dystopian visions of the future. The address is direct but follows dream logic, making the everyday strange and wondersome, awakening existential questions: Where are we? What is time? Who owns the story?
This exhibition combines new site-specific productions with selections from the artist’s oeuvre, including performance, photography, and video. In several works Anderson explores issues of subject and of identity, the roles we take and are given, for example, via the artist’s Swedish-born paternal grandfather, Axel Efraim Anderson (1881–1963).
In what is Anderson’s largest solo exhibition to date in Europe, visitors are treated to a narrative on the nature of time, space and existence. A representative selection of the artist’s works from the 1970s up to the present day is complemented with brand new, site-specific productions: conceptual art, performance, innovative musical instruments, compositions, stage shows, as well as activist art and political art. The exhibition serves as a forum for both physical materials and techniques – painting, sculpture, analogue photography, sound tapes and film strips – and new digital worlds, such as virtual reality.
Laurie Anderson, born in Glen Ellyn, a suburb of Chicago, in 1947 has Swedish ancestry on her father’s side. Her grandfather hailed from Dalsland.
Curator: Lena Essling