Los Angeles Times
Friday, October 17, 2003

A few notes on the Mideast, dating

Swedish artist Johan Thurfjell was an exchange student in L.A. when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks took place. Out of the barrage of analysis since then, he (along with everyone else) has tried to make sense of the complex political, religious, and cultural forces at play in the Middle East. At sixteen:one, Thurfjell’s installation “ An Attempt to Understand” takes a focused stab at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, cited by some as the catalyst for the attacks.
“Focus” is the operative word here, for what Thurfjell’s smart though slight work illustrates is that focusing on any single aspect of the situation is impossible. Every element is like a tile in an immense mosaic, not comprehensible until you stand back to see the larger picture.
Thurfjell’s project is a mosaic of 3-inch-square Post-it notes on which he has written discrete bits of information about the region. The notes are color coded according to 15 sources (a Roman Catholic encyclopedia, an Arab Web site, an American-Israeli lobbying organization and so on), and the story they tell across two gallery walls extends from 12,000 BC to the present.
About two-thirds of the way through, Thurfjell’s own voice crops up, on pink Post-its, to document his own chronology – his education, loves and losses, career milestones. There’s a radical kind of leveling that happens here when exile, expulsion, revelations of God and genocide are given equal billing with artist’s dating history. As both history lesson and autobiography, the work is inevitably abbreviated and distorted, but bringing the narratives’ multiple subjectivities to the surface seems to be Thurfjell’s point.
It’s a useful one, however obvious. The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. (curated by icespace) also features a few other works that scratch the surface where collective memory and popular culture intersect.



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