Emma & Jochen — Salon 75

b/w
Emma Hummerhielm Carlén & Jochen Lempert
Curated by Christine Dahlerup for Salon 75
15.12.2024 - 01.02.2025

Housed in a storefront, the architecture of Salon 75 carries traces of its former life as a shop. It is easy to imagine how merchandise was once displayed in the bay window, catching the attention of passersby. Inside, the room is framed by peculiar wall molding with recessed, tilt spotlights that may have been used to direct the gaze onto different objects. In the duo exhibition b/w, the delicate placement of Emma Carlén’s sculptural works and Jochen Lempert’s photographs alternately foreground or divert the circumstances of the space.

Carlén’s sculptural installations turn the logic of display inside out. Upon arrival, one encounters the back of Tilted slabs (2024), a large frame that leans against the window, supported by four cast miniature stools. The slab partly obstructs the view of what is inside the exhibition space. From the outside, passersby can only glimpse how the image surface – a paper sheet – neatly folds upon itself, becoming its own frame. Once inside, the front reveals itself as a blank image plane akin to a projection surface wherein the gaze can wander, and afterimages can appear. Elsewhere, on a table, Spots (2024) float in space like a dozen eyes removed from their sockets, glancing back at the ceiling. Above the bay window, another blank image plane, Untitled (2024), draws attention to a cavity in the room that might have passed unnoticed.

Where the installation of Carlén’s sculptures frames the space, Lempert’s distinctively frameless, black-and-white silver prints are mounted directly onto the wall. Yet their framelessness seems to emphasize that a photograph is already, in itself, an act of framing. It cuts and crops in the field of perception. As the walls of the exhibition space become a temporary frame for the photographs and photograms, formal aspects of the motives begin to converse with the texture of the hosting walls and pick up formal qualities of the space. Miniscule mussels captured on the light-sensitive sheet in Shells (photogram) (2024) evoke the feel of the carpet – or the other way around. A dove, Martha (2005), seems to mediate between the exhibition space and her chosen habitat in the city street. In another frame, a snail thrones on a packet of cigarettes. The white whorl shines in the darker landscape, adding yet another spotlight to the room.

If Lempert, a biologist by training, typically directs his lens at flora and fauna, the exhibition b/w foregrounds other aspects of his oeuvre through photographs that engage with a more abstract and sculptural syntax. The critic laughs (2024) – a mini print that invites a closer, more intimate view – makes familiar parts of the human body appear as four serial sculptures, not unlike Carlén’s cast sculptures of mini stools. The dialogue between the two artists’ practices is not only one of different modes of framing. It is also a conversation between casting and photography as distinct ways of capturing fleeting moments and the shape and textures of things in the world.

- Johanna Thorell

Photos by: Wassily Walter

Open by appointment

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