Jonas Dahlberg »Diorama«

While working on ideas and solutions for an expansive landscape, exposed to a wide public and addressing a whole nation’s experience of shock and loss, Dahlberg, in his private time, has returned instead to the local, the close-at-hand, the small-scale and the intimate.

In a group of photographic works Dahlberg captures portraits of common garden birds. In the tradition of many nature photographers and in line with Dahlberg’s own practice, that which appears to be a naturalist scene is actually borne of a constructed environment. Dahlberg attracts the birds in an arranged diorama, with feeder and perch. He sits and waits. Time drags out. Moments of significance occur outside his orchestration.

In the other major new work, Dahlberg presents another form of diorama, but at the scale of magnified microcosm. In the large-format video work Music Box, the viewer follows the camera’s journey though the confined space of a small music box - an object with personal and historical significance for the artist.

The tiny mechanisms of the box take on an industrial character in this expanded scale and recall the austerity of Adolf Lazi’s Neue Sachlichkeit photographs of the 1930’s, and the cinematic visual language of Chaplain’s Modern Times and Lang’s Metropolis. The associations of industrial alienation coexist with the intimacy of the personal object and the proximity of the camera. In another cinematic analogue the music box suggests a kind of Wellesian Rosebud significance that is never resolved. The literary allusion would be Proust’s Madeleine Cake - the intense gaze inside the box leads not to traces of Dahlberg’s own history but instead to associative moments in the history of industrialism and cinema.

In both bodies of work, time respectively slows down and comes to a halt. The frozen scenography of the diorama is both methodology and story-telling device. Dahlberg fictionalises reality and constructs a framework on which cinema and architecture are connected in their narrative potential, each built on the memory of accumulated sequences.

Jonas Dahlberg was born in Uddevalla, Sweden, in 1970, and currently lives and works in Stockholm. He has recently embarked upon several large public commissions, most notably his winning proposal Memory Wound for the July 22 memorials (inauguration 2017). Other public projects include The Mirror at Tele2 Arena, Stockholm, a permanent sound installation for the new architecture academy, Stockholm (2015), scenography for Verdi’s Macbeth, Grand Theatre, Geneva (2012). He has participated in Prospect II New Orleans Biennial (2011), the Lisbon Architecture Triannale (2010), the Busan Biennial (2004), the 50th Venice Biennial (2003) and Manifesta 4 (2002) and represented Sweden at the 26th Bienal de São Paulo (2004). Dahlberg has exhibited widely in many prestigious contexts. Selected solo exhibitions include Archizoom, Lausanne (2013), Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg   (2012), Galeria Foksal, Warsaw (2008), Neue Kunsthalle St. Gallen (with Jan Mancuska) and Frac Bourgogne, Dijon (2006), Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Bonner Kunstverein. Bonn (with Jan Mancuska) (2005) and Kunstverein Langenhagen (2003).