the king is not the queen -The mind against the eye in Contemporary European Film and Video. artists Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Simonetta Fadda, Cecilia Parsberg, Pippilotti Rist, Ann-Sofie Sidén, Sophie Tottie, Rosemarie Trockel, Sam Taylor-Wood, curator Fransesco Bonami dates: Jan 16 - Feb 27 location Nordiska museet (The Nordic Museum) THE KING AND QUEEN TRAVERSED BY SWIFT NUDES is a painting by Marcel Duchamp from 1912. This painting may contain a higher level of retinal ambuigity than the famous Nude Descending a Staircase - something solid and something in motion work their way out to the viewer's eye, creating a new field of perception. Because of the open possibilities of this painting, it's reception has been less clear than that of Nude Descending a Staircase, but at the same time, one can enter it from many more directions. I like the idea of these monarchs traversed by nudes. It creates a situation in which the powers are switched, or at least confronted by new possibilities: a king and a queen forced to negotiate their stereotypical images with another stereotype, the art historical construction of the "nude". Kings and queens are emblems of of stability, creating a space of action around them and producing a chain reaction of relationships which can alter conventional relations. The ideas of kings and queens are always connected to an external physical action that contradicts the popular, morbid curiosity about their inner psychic states. In thinking about the Duchamp work-but mostly about its title as a tool to generate new ways of thinking about power in an image and in life - I realized that playing with the title of an exhibition could be the best approach to defining the possibilities of the show itself. This brought me to uncover another level of awareness about fixed roles and power relations. Following this path, I reached a point where what had been obvious and absurd to confront became much less obvious and more open to be redefined. "The king is not the queen" is an assumption that, in its obscurity, might lead us to reflect on how the concepts of power between genders and countries, races and economic structures, work today. The title is loaded with more implications that I had expected, more than this project could ever sustain, yet it convinced me that a show could work effectively as a footnote to it. It engages a series of contradictions that are often not clearly addressed or worked through in our daily compromises within the flux of power that we constantly and subliminally negotiate to establish our positions among others. The king is not the queen, but who is the king and who is the queen, and once we have made the perhaps obsolete distinction, what does it mean for our relationship with the outside world? This show will not find answers but it might offer some links to possible transformative solutions for organizing and redistibuting the necessity of power among the components of our society. Again, the idea of this show is to suspend the conceptual definition of "role", expanding the parameters used to judge such a word, and at the same time offering the occasion to exchange visual and spatial roles in order to make, more room in which to act and create powerful meanings inside of contexts that are, by definition, excluded from power. All the works I selected for this show are built around a certain conflictuality which is created by shifting roles outside their usual mental locations. When this operation succeeds, we as spectators face images that no longer belong to the chronicle of expected experiences but assail the eye from the back of our minds, forcing us to look at images of life through the scars they have imprinted upon our retinal memories. What is projected or screened is the outside reality changing state from solid to vapour in our thoughts. Ideally, all the work should be experienced as a kind of epiphanic moment, as when the king becomes aware that he is not the queen, and the queen takes responsibility for her own power, when the ghetto shrinks inside the core of freedom, when all the quotas of correctness subside under the weight of independent identification. The exhibitions concepts have been limited to "video/film" "Europe" and "women" not to build a judicial enclave but to condense the provocative attitude of any genderized vision. I have tried to create a show that does not look at you, one that minds its own business, while you trespass upon it. So it's neither a matter of confrontation nor comfortation, but an attempt to define a certain independence of roles: the viewer, the subject, the privacy of emotion, and the indifference of self-destruction. The works are not connected to one another but create a mental static upon the spectator's line of thoughts. Together, the works push attention to the extreme and insists upon our listening closely to what we tend to dismiss. I'm sure that kings never think about not being queens, but in a way the purpose of this exhibition is exactly that of forcing a reflection upon what we are "not", a concern with clear separation. The more I think about it, the more I suspect that a queen can be a king, she can embody the symbolic role of the king because she has a wider range of possible powers. A king that turns into a queen is usually considered a wimp, someone who cannot handle the power to which he's entitled. This is what I'm interested in, finally: the limitations of power, rather than its possibilities. The works I selected reflect this concern, showing the violence of the harmless vision beyond a predictable gaze. By the end of the path, the spectators will probably have undergone a multi-layered transformation, they will have dealt with contradicting ways of controlling physicality or contradicting it. The show is on one level an idealistic inquiry into how it might be possible to rearrange power from different perspectives, or how the perspective might be redefined horizontally rather than vertically. Basically, I'm talking about the recycling of uncertainty and defensiveness into forces for a societal understanding of private zones of awareness.. That's why the show is not a point of convergence, but a tightrope of diverging identities. As a result, the works does not land inside the viewer's preconceptions; rather, they slip through his or her fingers. Ideally this exhibition should be a bouncing ball in a room with eight walls. So the artists, we might say, are at the same time both the walls and the ball. The first work in the show, Sam Taylor-Wood's projection, functions as an indicator of the exhibition's structure. The person we see - a naked man dancing - relinquishes his visual power to the sound and time attached to him. The emotional climax is stretched, edited in order to exclude any possible conclusions. One step further, Simonetta Fadda's work transforms a vision of social degradation into an aestethic moment devoid of moral consequences. On another level, Sophie Tottie's representation of a contemporary stereotype - the terrorist - is grounded upon the unreality of any extremes that are simplified in their ideological and political content. Quite different is Ann-Sofie Sidén's visualization of discomfort. Her mud queen is developed as a virus inside the logic of real life, but her presence is unpredictably accepted like a pigeon on a window sill. In Cecilia Parsberg's work, the action functions a therapy: the subject's moaning goes beyond mere fatigue and en-ters the ambiguous realm of an unconditioned sexual approach to the limits of one's physicality. Making it clear that the body is not the issue in this exhibition is Pippilotti Rist's handling of "presence". Her installation reduces the symptoms of sexuality to rules of game to be performed and played enthusiastically. Next, we recede inside the meaning of everyday acts performed with the intensity of an heroic event: Rosemarie Trockel's video of people wear-ing clothes transforms a simple action into a semi-ecstatic dance. Finally, at the end of the exhibition path, we en-counter Eija Liisa Ahtila's voices, descriptions, confessions and simple narrations of enlightening transformation. It is time to go back, from the queen to the king, from identity into the same-but-changed-role, disentangling ourselves, perhaps, from simplified consciousness. The path back is uncertain because we are stripped of preconceptions. The man who would be king is a movie by John Huston in which a group of people in the Hindu Kush, sealed of from "civilization" believe Sean Connery to be the descendant of a god. At first he plays along with this misunderstanding, but eventually he begins to believe in his own power as well as in his own "divine" nature. Gods, however, don't bleed when bitten by a jealous woman: he does, and his head rolls into a canyon. We all want to be kings. Too bad we all know that there are always queens as well. Francesco Bonami