Read Jen Graves' review of Ask A Banana, Baby in the Stranger

Read Regina Hackett's review of Ask A Banana, Baby in the Seattle PI


Ask A Banana Baby: Contemporary Swedish Video and Photography
Nathalie Djurberg, Johanna Billing, Annika von Hauswolff
Curated by Sara Callahan

July 24 - August 23, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 24, 6-8pm



Howard House is delighted to present Ask A Banana Baby, featuring work by three contemporary Swedish artists working in video and photography: Johanna Billing, Nathalie Djurberg, and Annika von Hausswolff. All three have exhibited widely both in the US and internationally, but this is the first time their work is shown in Seattle.
The artists present us with a world in which the uncanny, the strange and the threatening abound, and where the very idea of home is complex at best. Interior space and human relationships are prodded, dissected and demolished. The fluidity of space is interrupted, leaving us mystified and vaguely unsettled; a threatening presence, an antagonistic 'other' seems to always be lurking just within or beyond the frame. Like straw houses, these spaces are fragile and temporary, unable to protect us from the outside world which seeps in from cracks and openings, turning the familiar and cute into something threatening and vaguely odd. The title of the show, Ask a Banana Baby references a miss hearing of the Abba song Hasta Manana, itself an exoticized reading of the world; child-like, bizarre and filled with sentimental longing. The mishearing is strangely apt for the work on view, where humor and the absurd abound to various extents, where many questions are raised but few answers are given.

The three photographs on view by Annika von Hausswolff are set in interior spaces, and show three solitary figures in ambiguous poses and environments, ruptured and disturbed by small shifts in the expected. In A Given Moment in the History of Coming into Being, a child is standing in front of a curtain, shielding his eyes with his hands. A seemingly innocuous gesture, yet filled with anxiety and foreboding. In The 21st Century Transitional Object we see a couple standing side by side with a blanket covering their heads. The domestic backdrop of two tall windows, two chairs and the edge of a rug seems oddly duplicated, as though we're looking at a mirror image. The child-like play inferred, of hiding under a blanket, seems disturbing when 'played' by two adults, and the overwhelming sentiment is that of isolation and loneliness rather than whimsy or play. Self Portrait in the Studio with Flashlight and Pulled Down Pants, has almost supernatural associations; a halo-like ring of light hovers around the artist's body, literally highlighting her pulled down pants, yet it seems like a rather asexual gesture, more mystifying than titillating. The Freudian notion of the uncanny, Das Unheimliche is often used to describe von Hausswolff's work; the uncanny in this sense refers to the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar, and it is that very familiarity which makes the scenes so unsettling. The fact that there is no violence, no real drama or immediately discernable threat in von Hausswolff's images, but rather a sense of something being amiss or slightly odd, is what makes them so haunting.

Johanna Biling's Look Out! ! is set in the Gainsborough Studios in East London during the time that the old film studio was in the process of being turned into a luxury apartment building. A real estate agent leads a group of young people around the unfinished building, from one apartment to the next, up and down stairs. Domestic space here appears to be a rather hollow shell, a marker of civilization and safety, but with little substance. The boredom of all the characters is palpable- the agent doing what she's done countless times before, and the young “clients”, bored and seemingly indifferent; each character uninterested and unable to really engage with the space around them. Taps are turned on and off (they never work), doors are opened and closed in a stream of mindless, automatic activity. We are reminded of how thin the line is between function and dysfunction; between order and chaos. The area of London in which the building is located is itself not easily classifiable, it is in an in-between state where the council housing with its graffiti and working class inhabitants stare directly at the luxury apartment. We are reminded of the constant flux in the contemporary cityscape and the clashes that happen in transitional areas where one segment of society suddenly finds itself butting up against another.

In Nathalie Djurberg's claymation videos space and architecture are invaded by strange and often disturbing creatures. Violent ruptures, theft, decay, and highly charged sexuality are depicted in a medium generally reserved for children's television programs. The two pieces selected are both infused with a clear sense of place, a place that is disrupted violently and intrusively in various ways. In Feed All the Hungry Little Children, a shabby cityscape is suddenly crowded by a hoard of young naked children swarming around a scantily clad woman. She seems threatened at first, but finally retains some control of the situation by feeding them milk from her overflowing breasts. It is an erotic, nurturing, and imperialistic act all at once, and a powerful metaphor for the absurdity of the world around us; funny, titillating and macabre. In Our Own Neighborhood is a tale of a building, a home dismantled and taken apart. A cacophony of characters come and go, and anything that can be taken is looted or destroyed. The building is literally falling apart in front of our eyes until a lonely black panther makes himself at home in the rubble of some lost civilization. Djurberg's world is reminiscent of ours, it is familiar with its art and precious objects, its graffiti and decay; and just like the bizarre world around us, it manages to be both unsetting and strangely funny.