Ella Bertilsson presents a site-specific exhibition at The Dock that incorporates elements of sculpture, video, and sound. A purpose-built immersive environment explores the relationship between the external world, imaginative inner worlds, and dreamscapes. This unique space blends the qualities of a storage space and a catacomb, aiming to evoke a paradoxical sense of confinement and safety, as if cocooned within a protective womb.
With a haunting feeling of entrapment juxtaposed against a prevailing undertone of mundanity, the installation envelops the audience within its structure. The installation consists of cramped rooms and a corridor, divided by an array of materials such as wood, cardboard, wire netting, bed sheets, wallpaper, and assorted found objects, including obsolete junk and forgotten pre-loved items. These claustrophobic spaces are complemented by looping video works presented on monitors and analogue TVs.
Within this realm, Bertilsson delves into themes of domesticity, dissociation, and escapism through a layered narrative framework, which has adapted a sense of magical realism to portray the complex experience of what it means to be human.
Three sensory and viscerally dynamic video works play with the audience's perception and experience by placing the viewer into the scene through fabricated worlds and enigmatic prop materials that employ intricate costume design, scenography, and non-verbal storytelling. Themes surrounding the every-day, consumerism, throw-away culture, collective memories, and anthropomorphism are explored through a parasitic anxiety and childhood playfulness. By using metaphor, absurdity, and persona, the video works communicate a multifaceted reimagining, offering altered realities, and transitional states to convey dark humorous transformations driven by ritualistic and frequentative patterns.
The characters operating inside this liminal space are neither coming nor going. The main protagonist, dressed in lavender-coloured clothing, prepares the space by sweeping and rolling out fabrics, unpacking luggages, and placing objects to build environments for characters that they soon become. They dress up in costumes, which hang above their head, to play out animal personas of a goat, a fish, and a rabbit. An otherworldly strangeness combined with a voyeuristic presence pinpoints a strong sense of absence within the work. An unsettling soundscape permeates the gallery through the video works, fostering a pervasive sense of hypnagogic disruption, imbuing the space with emotive undercurrents that fuel a sense of disquieting tension.
The artist acknowledges the kind support of Museum of Everyone and IMMA's residency programme through the production of this work.