Good Luck Occasions (2008)
2008, mixed media installation: wall paintings in acrylic paint (various sizes), archive of 105 b.w. photographs (10 x 15 cm), printed essay of 30 p (28.5 x 18.5 cm)
Good Luck Occasions is a project realized during a studio residency at Duende Studios in Rotterdam, The Netherlands in early 2008. It contains personal narratives and research around how the sex and drug industry formulates and takes place within the Dutch society. For the project I documented more than one hundred shop fronts and names of businesses, and assembled them into a photographic archive. Some of the images were later transformed into real-size wall paintings of signs, and some other inserted into a printed essay. The contradiction between the rather utopian and romanticized ”image” these places try to create – mainly through names, such as The Free World or The Future – and what they actually represents, intrigued me. The deceptiveness or power of language and visual codes; that we are what we say we are, not what we actually are (because who can determine that?) In the exhibition at the end of the residency I tried to amplify and play with this ambiguity and contradiction even more, especially in the wall drawings (but also in the black and white photo archive), through removing the indicators of what kind of texts/signs/places it circled around. I also included some businesses outside of the sex- and coffeeshops (Christian churches or cafés, theaters, restaurants, shops) which used the same type of names.
The publication Good Luck Occasions was exhibited at the Swedish Printmakers’ Society’s Gallery in Stockholm in 2008, and at Botkyrka Konsthall in 2009, where it is accessible in the Labyrint Press archive.