The term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms as applied to populations of humans and other animals. It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.
The Social
This installation was an installation and centrepiece of the eponymous exhibition at Moderna Museet in Malmö. The work combines a scaled-down replica of Alex Nordell’s modernist ‘play sculpture’, The Apple from a nearby public park, a large wall print of an anarchic children’s workshop from the late 1970s and a tight row of papier-mâché animals. The work was on the one hand a manifestation of the title concept, of ‘the social’, with this piece being the central ‘square’ of the exhibition – the mothership around which all other works were organised. But it is also a meditation on a past moment and ideal of the social, an earlier and now fictionalised vision and ideology of play, community and inclusivity – an optimistic ideal of the free human with its own blindspots and fractures.
Commission for The Social at Moderna Museet Malmö., 2017. Wallpaper, sculpture, objects and LED-sign, 2017.