New and old possibilities

Documentation of 10 seconds performance.
Exposure with self trigger.
Trying to get as far away as possible from the camera.

Erik Berglins work is part performance, part photography. In each image, the artist prepares a camera on a ten-second timer, usually choosing a backdrop of post-war architecture with a handy aperture or ridged surface for better purchase. Setting the timer, the artist then pelts away from the camera, straight on, trying to get as far away from it as possible.

You see legs disappearing into holes, a body swinging as it’s pulled up over a fence or hoisting itself over a wall. Initially, these works recall parkour, the urban ‘free running’ phenomenon beloved of advertising agencies and undergraduate sociology dissertations. Yet they have a weird urgency and deadpan style that gives them a lightly held comic charm and surrealist visual punchiness. Magritte, as much as Bas Jan Ader, would have approved.

Sprinting and scrambling against the clock recalls a prison break, and some of the scenes – brutalist blocks and scuzzy back alleys – are lit by a blasting flash, like a searchlight, with the viewer as prison guard, the camera shot that of a rifle’s. It’s a comic riff on the old notion of ‘the gaze’ of 60s performance art with which these works have a distant aesthetic kinship. You might also think of Robin Rhode, whose temporary wall drawings similarly use photography to document a fleeting flash of beauty within a decrepit urban environment. Berglin’s works are slyer than Rhode’s, though, and more casual in their beauty. In “Pizzeria” the artist is caught clambering up a drainpipe on a shabby urban street: the interlocking geometry of window, brick and pavement offer a weathered abstract prettiness, a shopworn Mondrian. Fixed in place by a disinterested click, the artist sprawls on a pin, literally caught on camera.

/ Ben Street

Documentation from Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden.

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