Galleri Duerr

As the day fades into midnight hues explores human relationality and cohabitation through the act of playing. Game culture and folklore are rich in variation – not only are games ever-changing in time, but different age and social groups and even neighboring villages might have their own versions of the same game. How widely a game has been played in the world is reflective of human diversity – many are characteristic to just a small geographical area, while others are universal. In addition, each game type has its own function, be it entertainment, celebration, ritual, or for strengthening unity and a sense of belonging in a community. Many games that were popular centuries ago had belief-related, ritualistic, and even magical origins. Swinging and tugging games, as just one example, were believed to promote agricultural prosperity and good health. Many adult cultural customs carried over to children’s games. Games today generally have more entertaining purposes.

This series of paintings is both conceptually and technically a play – a play on childhood nostalgia and on the need to find footing in dubious times by exploring one’s past as well as a play with painted matter. For this series, Jüris has collected a selection of Estonian folk game instructions found in the national archives, and adding to them her own memories and interpretations. Jüris paints in an intuitive, slow and layered manner. The will of the acrylic material dictates the artistic process. She treats the painted matter as an agent in its own right, allowing unexpected forms and patterns to emerge as the paint flows across the canvas. As the painterly landscape grows and evolves, bodily shapes and synergies are identified and brought forth through found shapes painted in a highly controlled manner. Jüris takes advantage of the characteristics of the paint, such as its vibrancy and dullness as well as its fluency and transparency, in order to create a sense of beautiful apprehension – a subtle conflict between joy and unease, as well as a conflict between classical painting, arts and crafts and post- internet aesthetics.

Siiri Jüris (b. 1992) is a Swedish-Estonian painter, currently living and working in Uppsala, Sweden. She holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2021), as well as an MFA in painting from the University of Tartu (2017). Jüris has participated in many group exhibitions, mainly in Estonia, but also in Sweden, Slovakia, and Lithuania. She was one of the finalists for the Young Painter Prize in both 2019 and 2021, and in 2020 she won the “Young Tartu” competition. Jüris’ solo exhibition matter that (em)bodies was held at the Tartu Art Museum in February 2021. 

Karl Dunér (b. 1963) is a Swedish visual artist and theater director. His solo exhibition entitled Islands (Öar) at Prins Eugen’s Waldemarsudde in Stockholm in 2021, and later at the Swedish Institute Paris, showed, among others, a work with nine mechanical dolls. In Dunér’s visually strong works, there are often interesting references to drama, theater, and literature. Since his first exhibition of mechanical sculptures in 1997, a large part of Dunér’s work revolves around “Memory” and the “Art of Memory”. At Market Art Fair 2023 Galleri Duerr presents Dunér’s film installation Dragningen (The Draw) as well as a selection from his series Kordofon (chordophone).

The Draw consists of a film that is divided over five film cabinets in an aluminium housing, a format reminiscent of an aircraft’s “black box”. The film itself is seen through a 5 cm thick piece of Plexiglas, filling the entire cabinet, becoming a kind of time window with the eternal and futile striving to move forward.
The film is a single strenuous action in which a small wooden figure tries to climb a ladder in front of an arched painting. The figure’s plan is to get from the first film cabinet to and past the fifth. The difficulty turns out to be significant. The narrow span means that the figure always falls off and has to start a new attempt – a reference to Sisyphus’ punishment and single-minded striving.
The figure is a carved wooden figure which was probably once part of a wooden chair or table. In The Draw, the movement is no longer controlled by invisible mechatronics, but replaced by a highly tangible player who, with the help of a tool, tries to pull his figure forward.

In Karl Dunér’s Chordophones (Kordofon) there are always two strings hanging freely without a figure. One strives diagonally down towards the floor of the chordophone, while the other hangs as if cut off. The threads hang from a cherry wood tool, which in puppeteer parlance is called a Cross. The chordophones in our presentation are part of a larger series, made of wood, bamboo, linen fabric and thread. The word Chordaphone is the collective name for or all kinds of stringed instruments where one or more strings are connected to some kind of resonance box.
In Chordophone, the game consists of an interplay between two cut strings. They hang in a so-called cross where, through the many empty attachments, you can tell that many other threads were once attached. Or that the two remaining threads have been given many variations – that they sit where they sit mostly by chance. The viewer can guess that there was once a figure held up by the two threads. The figure is now gone. One thread hangs as if completely cut off and lifeless. The other strives in a seemingly impossible diagonal down towards the Chordophones floor, just barely reaching. Something keeps it still and fixed in a gravity-impossible tilt. To achieve this, the cordophone has a built-in invisible mechanical solution.