Pig skin, rag rug, rubber boots, painted jacket, stool, lamps, black plastic bags, black pennant, christmas tree. H 220 cm.

Star Fort, with its symbolic pentagram shape and its strange and creepy interior, draws upon a whole spectrum of references which are interlinked in complex ways. Pleasant Swedish rag rugs, a tree stump chair, the remains of a Christmas celebration gone berserk, references to the military and war, a grotesque pigskin and some unsettling black plastic bags, together with Star Fort’s militant exterior, create an intense atmosphere of something awry and psychologically unstable. The Scandinavian coziness and family idyll which we know from, for example, the works of Carl Larsson, is mixed here with something much more dramatic, hidden and dark. With an ambivalent combination of recognition and horror, remembrance and repression, this alternative “home” moves us in quite different ways to the idyll portrayed by Larsson, and the clash between the many divergent layers in Star Fort produces, in a wider perspective, new insights, reflections and significations.
The project is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

Included in the Nordic Art Triennial, Eskilstuna Konstmuseum, Eskilstuna, Sweden.

Photo: Hesselholdt & Mejlvang.