Aranya Art Center is delighted to present Swedish artist Alina Chaiderov's first solo exhibition in China, comprised of two newly commissioned sculptures, Core of Existence and Into Vastness, and a series of photographs.
Chaiderov often chooses to work with the simplest materials and plays with the intertextuality of their physical properties and their psychological implications. Born in the former Soviet Union and exiled to Sweden with her family in the late 1980s, the artist integrates collective experience, and individual encounters, in addition to the perception and sensation of her body and the subconscious, into her works, exploring the fundamental propositions of matter, time, memory, and space.
The materials presented in this exhibition are minimal, the transparency and fragility of the glass in Core of Existence contrast with the frigid and rigid qualities of the metal support. The copper in Into Vastness is the artist’s most commonly used metal, an element that's particularly dangerous and even deadly for a patient suffering from Wilson's disease like her, and the intake of which in food should be carefully controlled. At the same time, the artist believes that copper pipes in infrastructure are like the veins in the human body, transporting energy throughout the city-conceived as an urban "body." In this sense, she draws our attention to the broader social and cultural landscape through the mechanism of our bodies.
Artist
Alina Chaiderov explores the relationship between personal and collective memory. Through displacements and movements in sculptural compositions, she addresses such themes as matter, time, body and space. Her sensitive and fragile sculptures and installations are fixed within a conceptual tradition, asserting a vigorous material presence, drawing on the artist’s own souvenirs so to highlight – through the prism of her self-representation – an atmosphere, a wider historical, social and cultural background.
Alina Chaiderov was born 1984 in Leningrad, Soviet Union, living in Sweden since the early 1990s. She lives and works between Stockholm and Gothenburg. Recent solo exhibitions feature Fugue State, Ciaccia Levi, Paris (2020); Mending a broken world, Sörmlands Museum, Nyköping (2018); Ark, Art | Basel Statements, AntoineLevi gallery, Basel (2018); A New Memory is Made, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli – Turin (2016). She received the illy Present Future Award in 2015.
