POLITICS, THE SUN AND NOISE

Overgaden Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark. Part of the group exhibition: Sculpture - Painting - Textile, 1990.

This site-specific installation is constructed as a network of cables and sculptural islands with sound sources, video projections, and a poster asking to exchange their rented apartment in Stockholm for one in Copenhagen. One of the sound sources is about migrating birds, used as an indirect illustration of movements and exchange between people, goods and ideas.

Part one of this installation filled the room with sound and visual sources recorded in Athens, Stockholm and Copenhagen. The films showed political, religious and everyday content representing three eras: Antiquity, Byzantium, the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the Danish/German influence on the modern city plan of Athens and its neoclassical architecture. Part two of this installation, was a silent void with only the poster left for the remaining 13 days. All the other objects had been removed. As a result of the 'apartment exchange' poster, Åsa Lie and Jadran Sturm moved from Stockholm to Copenhagen and stayed for 4 years.

This key work in their joint oeuvre is a characteristic example of the way Åsa Lie and Jadran Sturm continually intertwined a personal and domestic reality with 'external' experiences concerning i.e. sociology, politics, architecture, history.

See the below excerpt from a talk between Scott William Raby (artist, arts organiser, researcher) and Åsa Lie

SCOTT WILLIAM RABY (ARTIST, ARTS ORGANISER, RESEARCHER) TALKING WITH ÅSA LIE. BRUSSELS, APRIL 20th 2025

Scott William Raby: The work seems to try to connect, through filmic and sonic outputs, these different eco-environmental, economical-political and commercial ways in which a certain migration politics, whether it be through the bird, whether it be through you and Jadran moving to Denmark, whether it be through the different people that you're meeting. They all connect and are intertwined in the exhibition in a different form or format. And, I wanted to ask, on the theme of bringing a domestic space into your work, isn't this the exhibition where you ended up moving to Copenhagen? 

Åsa Lie: Yes, in this photo you can see the poster which we made for our installation. At that time, we were living in Stockholm, but neither of us come from there. We had both been moving around quite a bit, and thought; Let’s try to move to Copenhagen now. One of the sound sources, with chirping birds, is placed below the poster. We asked someone to take a picture of us, outside the art centre, just before the exhibition opened. We used that polaroid on the poster with a short text explaining that we wanted to exchange our rented apartment in Stockholm with someone in Copenhagen.

SWR: A really important exhibition, not only in your artistic practice, but in your life. 

ÅL: Yes, it's quite typical that we mix something personal into our work. As it says here in the text; the first part of the installation filled the room with sounds, like I mentioned before; and with suggestive political representations from three eras. From our point of view, this video from Athens, with all those objects, is very much showing this. The vitrine contained all kinds of everyday objects, like clothes, uniforms, vases, things from the army, there could be a chair, anything. But it also gave a timespan view through a part of history. And it was quite touching, it was a variation on how we made the poster. People would come to the guy who had this vitrine and give him a photo of something they wanted to sell. He put it all together, and if people wanted to buy something, they could call the number. 

SWR: Just as you advertised for an apartment within the exhibition.

ÅL: Exactly. We connected those two things, our experience in Athens of how people were trying to sell things, and our own situation, where we wanted to find an apartment. We thought, how do we do that? So we decided to make it part of the exhibition. Instead of putting an ad in a shop window, like they did in Athens, we did it inside the installation itself. We didn’t advertise anywhere else or try to find an apartment in any other way.

So, that part of the installation is more personal, but still connected to something larger, a time span with historical examples. The installation referred to these three eras: antiquity, Byzantium, and the 19th–20th century. Concerning the 19th and 20th century, we found out that Denmark and Germany had had a big influence on the town plan of Athens, which was developed at that time. So below and around the Acropolis, with all the ancient Greek stuff and the plaka, you have the more modern part, which was built by Danish and German architects. One of the key architects was Greek-German. There was also influence from the Danish royal family. We found out about this while in Athens for another exhibition. Later, we were invited to participate in this exhibition in Denmark. So everything kind of connected. We were traveling back and forth, and that movement itself became part of the work, a kind of migration, like so many people who move for work. 
It sounds a bit messy perhaps, but there's a combination of those things, the personal, the historical, and the movement between places.

SWR: No, no. I think it's quite an interesting and complex interaction, both in terms of formal and content-related approaches. It’s trying to connect some of these different economical, geopolitical, migration and political circumstances. But at the same time, there’s also a formal artistic approach, and even a kind of social intervention, in the way the work enters into your domestic life. The exhibition, it becomes an artistic proposition, but also has an affect within your real life, in terms of establishing yourself through an advert.

ÅL: I can also say that the way we did this was very deliberate. Athens, and the history of Greece in general, is so pompous, right? 

SWR: Spectacular. 

ÅL: Yes, spectacular. The Acropolis and all those monuments. We wanted to use the exhibition space in  the opposite way. We didn’t do something spectacular or pompous. Instead, we worked with small things, spread out. It was a big space, so people could walk around. When you stood near one cassette player, you could hear that one, but not so much the others. Like the buzz of a city.

SWR: Yes, more like a primary structure, sculpture. Or more like Arte Povera, very...

ÅL: Yes, you could walk around in a big space, and experience each of these small things individually and interact at ‘islands’, like the table with the super 8 viewer. It wasn’t about creating a big façade.. quite the opposite. We intentionally dressed it down.

SWR: Yes, I appreciate that approach. 

ÅL: Minimal amount out of it instead of… I mean, we could have screened the Super 8 films really big. We could have made something more material, a stronger manifestation, let’s say, aesthetically. But for us, this was exactly the aesthetics we wanted.

SWR: Actually, you can see that right here, where there's the... Using the architecture of the space as a surface for projection, right? It creates a completely different kind of viewer-receiver relationship, and it's much more modest and de-spectacularized.

ÅL: Yes, this also refers back to all the temples and the pillars in the history of Greece. Because you have that in art history; the Corinthian pillar, the…

SWR: Yes, like Doric.. 

ÅL: Yes, exactly. This kind of historical vocabulary that you learn when studying architecture or art. Here, there was a very simple, almost industrial pillar in the building, just a structural element to hold it all together. And we used that.

The super-8 films were also shot in Greece, one around the Byzantine Daphni Monastery on the site of the Temple of Apollo, the other at the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. In a way, these temples represent for Europe, or for the Western world, a kind of foundation for how we imagine architecture. Architecture as something powerful, connected to authority and politics. And that also happened in Athens. The German and Danish architects were focused on neoclassical architecture. 

Then we decided to cut it off at a certain moment, to take everything away, and leave behind a big, quiet empty space. We thought of this last part, let's say, as more metaphysical. We first filled the space with sounds and films and cables, and then, once you take everything away, there should be a trace. Something left behind, even if you can't see or hear it directly.  That was our thought. 

It's also.. we go to places and when we leave, that place is without us, or we are without that place. Also, the fact that we were about to move, that we wanted to move, was similar: you empty one apartment when you leave, and then you arrive and fill up another. So, you know.. it’s made up of these little details, part of everyday life, and other aspects. It’s quite typical of how we’ve often worked.

SWR: Yes, that's a really interesting and important aspect of this project, as well the performative and intervention aspect.. Maybe this could be a good transition to talk about the performance at Cafe Europa, which is a performative intervention in public space. As I've become more familiar with your and Jadran's practice, I’ve noticed that an important recurring motif seems to be using a public or institutional space and thinking about how to reconfigure it through a performative moment. Whether it be one that you are invited into, or one where you are reprogramming, hacking or rethinking the social dynamics of a space.

Åsa Lie with Scott William Raby in Jadran Stum & Åsa Lie Private Foundation archive, April 2025