Nina Canell

Nina Canell is a Swedish artist (b1979) now working in Berlin.  Her practice looks at events and asks questions of the event, the objects and human involvement.

Events, by their very nature, are moments of change, of entropy, of energy and mass. Using ‘simple’ materials Canell presents us with time, with processes and states of being.  To quote Canell in an ArtReview interview: “I have often tried to approach the relationship between the material and immaterial through sculpture as an agent or condition – it has this potential of articulating the fluctuations between things – a kind of glue”(Canell 2016).

These fluctuations seem to occur at many levels – her Shedding Sheaths series observed the processing and transformation of the protective sheath around large electrical communication cables – the change of state and purpose as the conductive components are removed in the context of the plasticity of communication.  Events have a signature of time too, perhaps instantaneous, perhaps cosmological, perhaps both.  In looking at the submarine communication cables that facilitate the internet, Canell takes a slice of cable, presented in different ways and equates it to a period of time, or something caught mid-sentence.  In Perpetuum mobile (25kg) an opened bag of fresh cement placed next to a vapourising bowl of water is slowly transformed into a solid.  A dynamic and to all intents irreversible relationship becomes evident.

For me there’s an alchemy to Canell’s work that looks between the lines, that leaves you feeling closer to intangibles, somehow takes on the blur of reality and forges new paths of intuition.  I aspire!

Canell, Nina (2016) accessed 29 June 2018 https://artreview.com/previews/basel_2016_questionnaire_5_nina_canell/