Dearest, these are my notes
For my
Thriller.
1. Do you believe the world loves you?
Sister said to Satan: my diary is too hot for you is a newly commissioned installation from artists Josefin Arnell and Margaret Haines, presenting a collection of moving image works, texts and posters exploring their shared interests in ideas of destiny, collective experience and mysticism. Taken as a whole, the works present a shifting cast of culturally identifiable yet unattainable performers, appearing momentarily as apparitions across the exhibitions spaces, living double lives.
2. I eat. I have sex. I go to a gallery dinner. I throw up in the alley.
Arnell and Haines’ images slip between screens and display systems scattered across the exhibition space: their sliding narratives inviting a sense of telos that underpins the movements of characters throughout the works. Enacting perverted prophecies, the characters throughout the films occupy the position of actors in a wider plan, with boundaries and intentions that aren’t clear, walking dreamlike through a no man’s land of time and space out of joint. Ideas of hauntology hover at the edges, staining the environments with an implacable time, time that is undeniably current but broken, creating a new kind of fictional mode of exhibition making: one of mythologies.
3. What is the difference between auto insurance and a belief in god?
Sister said to Satan: my diary is too hot for you evokes legends and gods both contemporary and consigned to history, with the power they wield over their subjects permeating throughout. Alongside the specific naming of certain characters from mythology, the artists create powerful depictions of spaces on the peripheries of reality, ones characterised by youthful desires for escape and endorphins but anchored in the mundane reality of teenage life.
The exhibition has been made possible with support from Canada House, Goethe-Institut London, The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in London and The Embassy of Sweden in London.
Auto Italia’s commissions are made possible by our Exhibition Circle and Member supporters.
Josefin Arnell (b. 1984, Sweden) lives and works in Amsterdam. She works with video operating as the primary medium of her work which also extends to performance, installation, objects, poetry or printed media. Her film Mothership goes to Brazil (2016) premiered at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (2016) and have recently been shown at Beyond future is past – Kunsthalle Münster. Recent exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2017); Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Vilnius (2017).
Margaret Haines (b. 1984, Montreal, Canada) works between Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Her latest films are multifaceted meandering narratives riddled with philosophical investigation. In 2015-2016 she has been a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited and screened at ltd los angeles, Los Angeles (2017); CA, Carroll Fletcher Gallery, London (2017); ICA, London (2016), and 1646, The Hague (2015).
