11 September – 18 October 2020
UKS

EXHIBITION
JOSEFIN ARNELL: WILD FILLY STORY

Opening: Friday 11 September, 3–9pm
Exhibition: 12 September – 18 October 2020
Interview: Read UKS’ interview with Josefin Arnell here

Please save the date—Friday 11 September—for an all afternoon launch of Josefin Arnell’s solo exhibition Wild Filly Story at UKS. To allow people to circulate at a safe distance, the opening runs over five hours from 3 to 9pm with the artist and UKS’ Director, Rhea Dall, giving short guided tours through the show every hour from 4 to 7pm.

On entering Arnell’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Scandinavia, expect a country-and-western style grandstand, silage, holograms, and horse love. Arnell’s exhibition centers on a new film starring a pack of adolescent girls in a stable, prompting questions of friendship, misfit, and normativity, fetishization and female empowerment. Instructed in a reality-show-like manner, the young girls method-act through stages of agitation, thriving on the Swedish artist’s own rural childhood trauma and her recent short-lived career as a porn film director: teens pulling hair, grand stallions being objectified, food fights, horse healing, and “explicit content” kissing. Archaic group dynamics of power and its misuse are pushed forward, lurking just below the surface of welfare society’s supposed safe-spaces and gender equality. In her film, these grim dynamics are coupled with a filmic gaze, hungry for popular entertainment: it’s an underlying rule here that someone’s got to be trashed.

 

BIOGRAPHY:
Josefin Arnell (b. 1984) has recently presented work at venues including Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019); Lily Robert, Paris (2019); and Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018). An alum of Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Arnell is based in Amsterdam.

 

PRESS

— Review in Kunstkritikk (online journal)
Full galopp, Kunstkritikk, 16.09.2020

— Review in Morgenbladet (newspaper)
En hest med baller, Morgenbladet, 25.09.2020

— Feature on Art Viewer
Josefin Arnell at UKS, Art Viewer, 27.11.2020

Images from the opening of Josefin Arnell’s solo exhibition at UKS. All photos by Jan Khür

Josefin Arnell, “Wild Filly Story” at UKS. Photos by Vegard Kleven

Film stills from Josefin Arnell’s “Wild Filly Story”, 2020

Josefin Arnell, "Wild Filly Story", 2020 (extract)

Josefin Arnell, "Wild Filly Story", 2020 (extract)

Josefin Arnell, "Wild Filly Story", 2020 (extract)

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