Sofia Hultén: “Unstable Fakers of Change in Self”

With Unstable Fakers of Change in Self, the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art presents a new series of works by Sofia Hultén which the artist has developed for the Maschinenhaus M0. She uses conventional scaffolding as the material for her works, which she constructs in different ways, adding various materials and combining them with videos. The result is a group of free-standing sculptures in which Hultén breaks up temporal structures and causal relationships and negotiates dimensions of possibilities.

The starting point for the exhibition’s somewhat cryptic title is Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 bronze sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, an iconic Futurist work, which is featured on the Italian twenty-cent coin. Sofia Hultén uses the initial letters of the words in the title to form her own combinations of words, which she uses for the exhibition title, Unstable Fakers of Change in Self, as well as the titles of the works.

The individual works literally consist of a framework whose parts are characterised by various kinds of traces. The videos distributed across the sculptures show how the artist adds spray paint, coins, cable ties, buckets, and nets to the scaffolding. She thus provides concrete clues about how these traces came to be. Hultén playfully defies linear sequences and upends the principle of cause and effect: instead of temporal continuity and chains of causation, she emphasises simultaneity and the wide range of possibilities. Everything could have turned out quite differently, after all.

Sofia Hultén (*1972 in Stockholm) lives and works in Berlin.Her works have been featured in solo exhibitions including Here’s the Answer, What’s the Question? (Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2018, and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2017), Coulda Woulda Shoulda (Daniel Marzona, Berlin, 2018), Entropy High (i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, 2016), When Lines Are Time (Espai13 Fundació Miró, Barcelona, 2015), Matter Is Plastic in the Face of Mind (Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 2014), and How Did It Get So Late So Soon (Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2013).