Staffan Westerberg:
En ask i en ask i en ask

STAFFAN WESTERBERG: EN ASK I EN ASK I EN ASK (2024)

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Curated by Andjeas Ejiksson

 

Ever since childhood Staffan Westerberg has been exploring the tragedy and playfulness of existence, from the early cardboard miniature theater to puppet theatre, cabaret, television, drawing, painting, and poetry: What does it mean to be human, to be born, to exist, to love, to mourn, to remember, and to disappear into death and oblivion? Here, everyday life is transformed into stories and drama, with the help of an umbrella or a sock, a bread shovel or a piece of wood washed up on a beach. It is a world that neither shuns the real, the terrifying, nor the fantastic.

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With the traveling exhibition “En ask i en ask i en ask”, Westerberg returns once again, this time through a collection of suitcases on the loose. The exhibition consists of seven suitcases present, each of them presents a selection of his practice and his world of thought. As in so many of Westerberg’s productions, we meet a mix of familiar and unfamiliar, Lillstrumpa and Syster Yster on the one hand, Familjen Kuk on the other. Here is also a choir of spoons that are singing “O–I–O–I–O–I,” a small library of scripts and notebooks, a scenography, and a box full of boxes turning the apartment in Stockholm where Westerberg have lived and worked since the 1960s, inside out.

 

Each bag is also accompanied by stories, thoughts, and songs that Westerberg has recorded during the winter of 2023–2024. He has a rare ability to create his own mythological universe which, through television and theatre, has populated the public consciousness. Many people in Sweden remember “Vilse i pannkakan”, which was broadcast for the first time on television in 1975, and which eventually became a watershed as some claimed to have been traumatized by watching it. In response, Westerberg made several performances in the 2000s where he, under the headline “Worse than Stalin!” tried to help the audience get over the trauma. And maybe it was a successful therapy because in recent years it seems that the love for Staffan Westerberg is stronger than ever. It is a unique oeuvre, absurd and quirky, comical, sad, and bold, and it is still alive and flourishing in a small green house just outside Uppsala in Sweden.

 

The exhibition is curated by Andjeas Ejiksson and produced by Kin museum for contemporary art in Kiruna. During 2024, it will also be shown at Gällivare Kulturmuseum, Råneå Konsthall, and Överkalix Konsthall.