Joakim Eneroth:

Joakim Eneroth at Kulturnyheterna (Swedish Television).
>> Kulturnyheterna [20110119]

Short Stories of the Transparent Mind

Joakim Eneroth’s new work of images and texts, “Short Stories of the Transparent Mind,” is the vivid record of a personal journey to uncover the fundamental emptiness that lies beyond and beneath our day-to-day experience of the world.  Punctuated by stark and sometimes personally revealing texts, he presents us with a series of striking photographs – naked, vulnerable figures standing in a nocturnal landscape; empty rooms miraculously animated by light and mind; a jumble of footprints, tracks, and vacant streets leading nowhere; signs emptied of their meaning, rooms emptied of their contents and individuals emptied of their personas and limitations.

Eneroth’s meditation practice, and his camera’s trained inner eye, allows him to peel back the layers of the self and the external surfaces that obstruct our inner vision.  The result is a profound meditation on the key Buddhist concepts of Impermanence and Emptiness in contemporary life, and the fullness that emerges within us when our inner mirror is finally polished and the clutter long blocking our vision is cleansed. Joakim Eneroth has said that his goal is to reach the point when “the story line fades away” and we arrive at “a moment of being no one going nowhere.”  His is a journey we all should take.

– Bill Viola

Joakim Eneroth (b. 1969) lives and works in Stockholm. His works are included in public collections as Tate Modern (London), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), MEP (Paris), and more. Short Stories of the Transparent Mind is Eneroths second exhibition at Christian Larsen, it is now also released in book form at Powerhouse Books (NY).

Swedish Red / Alone With Others

The idea of there being a place where everything should be good and agreeable can very easily become characterised as a naive projection. In the photographic series Swedish Red, the artist Joakim Eneroth explores what happens at the intersection between our need for security and our desire for control.

The familiar domestic context of leafy suburban Swedish streets, home to the dream of the idyllic red and white painted wooden villa has become twisted out of shape and transformed into a system of closed private spheres. These are places where fear is manifested in facades, both physical and mental. What becomes visible is a state of mind where the idea of one’s home being one’s castle has been replaced with the need for an impregnable fortress. The neatly cut privet hedges act as barriers against an uncontrollable and unpredictable reality.

Alone with Others is a series depicting public places such as beaches, parking lots, ski slopes and parks; places where we are part of a collective, but still remain anonymous and separate. The situations depicted are like quiet meditations on the complex sensation of wanting to experience a sense of belonging, whilst still maintaining a distance. The series can also be seen as a light-hearted observation of the existential dilemma of knowing that we are alone in our personal experience of life; that human beings are born alone and die alone, a truly universal human experience.

The pictures in the series Alone with Others have been taken in real environments, photographed with a manipulated photographic plate that creates the sensation of looking at miniature landscapes. The series' title comes from Stephen Batchelor’s book of the same name.

Joakim Eneroth lives in Sweden, but works mainly internationally. His work is represented in the collections of the Tate Modern in London, Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York and Paris MEP. Three new books by Eneroth will soon be available, Swedish Red, published by Steidl and Alone with Others and Short Stories Of The Transparent Mind with a foreword by Bill Viola, both published by Powerhouse Books in New York.