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The Swedish Camp
(a video and document based work, 2019)

”Nordahl spent some years in the early 1980s in a Swedish residential area in Sri Lanka, where his parents worked for a company that had won a major contract to build a dam. The main part of his work is a video which mixes family home-movies from that period – end-of-term Christmas celebrations at school and Nordahl’s final trumpet performance – with recordings from his return visit to the now quite dilapidated residential area. But it also includes clips from both Sri Lankan and Swedish television, because the dam project received so much publicity.
(…)
Nordahl lived through all this, and in his work, you can read both newspaper articles and his school essays on life in Sri Lanka. You can see family photos and posters for football matches between the Swedish company team and a local club. The combination of private and public material raises questions of colonialism and imperialism, not least when global corporations are the actors, which begin to burrow under your skin.”

(Excerpt from a text by Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen, Kunstkritikk 21.08.19. https://kunstkritikk.se/konst-som-inte-kan-misslyckas/ . The original text is in Swedish. Translation from Swedish to English by Kieron Brown.)


LINK TO THE VIDEO: The Swedish Camp (color video with sound, 15 min. 2019)



Documentation of the work The Swedish Camp (2019) from the exhibition Absolute Affirmation at Gelb 2019



Documentation of the work The Swedish Camp (2019) from the exhibition Absolute Affirmation at Gelb 2019



Documentation of the work The Swedish Camp (2019) from the exhibition Absolute Affirmation at Gelb 2019



Documentation of the work The Swedish Camp (2019) from the exhibition Absolute Affirmation at Gelb 2019



Untitled (Millennium City, Sri Lanka 2011) (c-print, Jesper Nordahl 2018). Documentation from the exhibition Absolute Affirmation at Gelb 2019.