179 kg
3 MPH (Horse to Rocket)
3 MPH, C-Prints
53 West 9th Street (The Psychiatrist's House)
After The Fact
Alice Polaroids
Codex
Curtain Callers
Curtain Callers (Entracte)
Curtain Callers Diptychs
Curtain Callers x 16
Day 17 Linköping
Day's Inn
Day's Inn Projections
Fideicommissum
Good Morning America
Greetings to the Swedish Farmers and their Asian Women I
Greetings to the Swedish Farmers and their Asian Women II
Head Gallery Piss Up
Head Lake Piss Down
In Passing
In Passing – Lost Maria
It's By Confining One's Neighbor That One is Convinced of One's Own Sanity I
It's By Confining One's Neighbor That One is Convinced of One's Own Sanity II
Kretslopp
My Country (Somewhere in Sweden)
Parasite
Playground - The Sky is the Limit!
Poshlust! (A Quest for White Horses)
Prop For World Picture II
Prozim! Tschechisen Blumen
Puzzled
QM The Clocktower
QM at NK
QM at the Art Fair
QM, I Think I Call Her QM
Queen of Mud Museum
Same Unknown (Strains 1, 2, & 3)
Same Unknown Studies
Same Unknown Studies (Hieroglyphs)
Same Unknown Studies (Individuals)
Sofi's Room
Station 10 and Back Again
Sticky Floors
The Preparation
The Test Chamber
The Wigmakers Visit
Tristessa
Turf Cupola
Untitled (Baby Klappe)
Untitled Studies
Warte Mal!
Warte Mal! – Eva x 2
Who Told the Chambermaid
Would a Course of Deprol Have Saved van Gogh's Ear?
"Playground - The Sky is the Limit!" 2023
Lekplatsen - Himlen är vårt enda tak!
Cast Aluminum and Bricks
"Playground – The Sky is the Limit!" is a site-specific art work in two pieces: a patterned brick walkway and an aluminum sculpture. The sculpture shows two young women on stilts whose hands meet above a wall that separates them.
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"Tristessa" 2018
Commissioned by the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, premiered 2018, Tristessa is an adaptation of Angela Carter’s novel, The Passion of New Eve.
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"Sticky Floors" 2014
9-channel mixed-media Video Installation (no sound)
The material is largely recorded by using the pub’s own surveillance equipment with a 24-hour cycle cut and edited into a 90 minute long, 9-channel, black and white silent movie
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"Curtain Callers x 16" 2012
16 pigment prints on acid-free semigloss cotton rag
Based on video stills and photographic material as used in Curtain Callers and Curtain Callers (Entracte).
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"Curtain Callers Diptychs" 2012
7 Diptychs, pigment print on acid-free semigloss cotton rag
Based on video stills and photographic material as used in Curtain Callers and Curtain Callers (Entracte).
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"The Wigmakers Visit" 2011
6-channel Video Installation
Duration: 10 minutes, 30 seconds
Original music by Jonathan BeplerThe wooden head skulls used in the making of wigs resemble sculptures and totems as collected by Freud. And as they were instruments in man’s ancient rites and rituals, the sculptures also symbolize the beginning of theater. The wigmakers at work keep the ritual going, charging physical objects in our search of understanding a character.
Ann-Sofi Sidén (2010)
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"Same Unknown Studies (Hieroglyphs)" 2011
409 ceramic tiles on 84 x 104 meter wall in Kumla, Sweden
Konstnären Ann-Sofi Sidén, Stockholm fick ett hedersomnämnande i Byggkeramikrådets årliga tävling om "Stora Kakelpriset", för en synnerligen originell utformning av en 75 m2 stor fasadbeklädnad i centrala Kumla med titeln "Italienska Hieroglyfer" Fasaden är klädd med klinkerplattor i format 29 x 59 cm, glaserade i en äggskals vit färg. På ett stort antal av plattorna glider människor ned längs vertikala stänger.Text excerpt by Stig Lodén (2013)
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"Curtain Callers (Entracte)" 2011
In collaboration with Jonathan Bepler
5-channel Video Installation with 7.1 surround sound
Duration: 35 minutes
...the camera is slowly tracking from left to right, along the empty rows of a theater auditorium, followed by a curtain, a painted garden scene, another curtain, a room in which a lady cleans a large round table cluttered with empty wine glasses (the sound of the glasses clinking, a single piano tone, gently struck)...through the large windows behind her you catch a glimpse of daylight, while the camera keeps moving steadily and tracks along a bookshelf, followed by a cozy dressing room...you're a minute or so into this and you realize that it's actually not the camera that is moving but the images themselves...
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"Curtain Callers" 2011
In collaboration with Jonathan Bepler
Single Channel HD Film
Duration: 20 minutes
An actress shuffles on stage, high on pills, with her back to the audience, looking out at a black space in the wings. "Is that a window that I'm staring out of? Is that what it is?"
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"Same Unknown Studies (Individuals)" 2010
8 Triptychs, C-Prints
Systematic indifference, on all levels, political, personal. And the time factor, the entropy. Where advances of one generation are often discarded in the next. It’s said about horses that they only react to voice, weight and pressure. I think we are the same.Text quote by Ann-Sofi Sidén (Venice Interview Rhomber 2009)
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"Same Unknown Studies" 2010
9 C-Prints
Porträtterade i en varken särskilt smickrande eller vanligt förekommande ställning ser de rätt lustiga ut. De är vanliga människor i olika kroppar, olika åldrar, olika attribut längs en stång. Är den ett hjälpmedel, eller ett besvär? Gör den tillvaron onödigt komplicerad, är den ett nödvändigt ont, är den oumbärlig, eller möjliggör den genvägar?Text excerpt by Anna Dubra (Tidningen Kulturen 2010)
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"My Country (Somewhere in Sweden)" 2010
4-channel Video Installation with sound
Duration: 39 minutes, 50 seconds
Hon rider framåt den väg som hästen bär, men hon tar konsekvenserna av Kerouac, Ekelöf och Wenders: parallella händelser, parallella rörelser, kompletterande bilder. Det finns inget slut. Bara mer tid, mer berättelse: mitt land.Text excerpt by Jan Åman (Reoriented & Bodensarnas Bodenskola 2012)
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"Kretslopp" 2010
2-channel Video Installation
Duration: 38 minutes
The slow methodical nature of the horizontal milking carousel evokes a contemplative state. As observers, we also catch sight of ourselves as human beings, as animals, as an individual in the crowd, here and now, being stared down by the slightly reserved yet curious cows who are ready to be milked again, and again.Ann-Sofi Sidén (2010)
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"Day 17 Linköping" 2010
Digital Print
Still photograph taken on Day 17 of Ann-Sofi Sidén's journey through Sweden on horseback, the video installation, My Country (Somewhere in Sweden)
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"Same Unknown (Strains 1, 2, & 3)" 2009
9-channel Video Installation
The pole has become an axis around which life spirals down at different speeds. A simple task that requires concentration and a sort of bravery, always into the "Same Unknown".Ann-Sofi Sidén (2009)
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"Puzzled" 2008
Concrete puzzle pieces, with lights
Det engelska ordet "puzzle" betyder på en och samma gång "förbrylla" och "klara ut". Som motiv erbjuder pusslet en lekfull struktur som kräver eftertanke och samtidigt är en gåta att lösa.Text excerpt by Ann-Sofi Sidén (2008)
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"Untitled (Baby Klappe)" 2007
Video Installation, Mixed Media
This is an incubator-like hatch installed in the outer walls of some children’s hospitals. The hatches are there for mothers who intend to abandon their babies. In order to avoid children being left out of doors and becoming ill, the mothers can leave them in a hatch without being seen. The use of the hatches, naturally, sparks debate. Another fact is that this practice has no basis in law and goes on without actually being legally valid. Like many of the rooms that Sidén takes us with her into, the baby hatch is a place that should not exist.Text excerpts by Sara Arrenius
(Exhibition Pamphlet 2008 Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden)
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"Parasite" 2007
A gross creature which gobbles up a fish's tongue and then replaces it with its own body has been found in Britain for the first time.Text excerpt from (bbc.co.uk 2005)
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"In Passing – Lost Maria" 2007
Photogravure
One of the main characteristics of In Passing is undoubtedly its testimonial, chronicling nature. There is not a shred of morality or of an attempt to direct viewers to a specific conclusion. However, such a depiction of social reality inevitably inspires reflection, not just an artistic reflection, but also deontological.Text excerpt by Juan José Santos (Kiasma Exhibition Catalogue "Fluid Streets" 2008)
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"In Passing" 2007
6-channel Video Installation, with sound, synchronized video
Duration: 14 minutes
A fragmented story – told from a number of different perspectives – of a young woman who leaves her infant child in the baby hatch of a Berlin hospital. This act of desperation sets into motion a narrative following two parallel journeys, one of the orphaned child and another of its mother ...
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"After The Fact" 2007
12 Photogravures
(8 diptychs and 4 singles). Various sizes Somerset Satin paper, 410 gr. Edition 9 + 2 H/C + 2 E/A Published by BCP&P galería, Madrid
A young mother leaves her baby girl behind in a Babyklappe outside a Berlin hospital in the early dawn. This ruthless but yet responsible act is captured by rough video, mixed with the crisp clear images of still photography. The video installation In Passing 2007 covers the theme of abandonment. The large-scale projections juxtapose a desperate woman on the fringes of society and the inside workings of a rational institution, that of the hospital ...
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"Queen of Mud Museum" 2004-2006
18-channel Video Installation
"QM is a quaint creature, a paradoxical figure, whose nature combines primitive features with modern high tech. She is programmed to promote the development of humanity, and she can travel through space. Her muddy appearance suggests a prehistoric caveman, but she is a visionary, and has the ability to infiltrate other people’s dreams."Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"Poshlust! (A Quest for White Horses)" 2003
7 Frames, each containing 2 Prints (front and back)
Das russische Wort poshlost beschreibt die enge Beziehung zwischen Banalität und Brutalität, was Nabokov in poshlust transformierte (Engl. posh, feudal, piekfein, und lust, Wollust, Gier).
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"3 MPH, C-Prints" 2003
C-Print
Cutting through a variety of social and cultural diversity, modern-day Texas, its infrastructure and people along with their immediate surroundings are put into the foreground, images mundane but rich in detail, pulled along by horse and rider.
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"3 MPH (Horse to Rocket)" 2003
5-channel Video Installation with sound, and custom-made Gonzales Bench
Duration: 38 minutes
Travelling at a rate of 3 miles per hour, a horse and a rider can journey from downtown San Antonio to Houston, Texas. And in July 2002 Ann-Sofi Sidén and her Appaloosa horse, Shaman, did just that.
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"Warte Mal! – Eva x 2" 2001
Lambda Print, Diptych
The image of Eva captures a moment of attention that she gives to me, and the next moment when she turns, back to working the street.Ann-Sofi Sidén (2004)
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"Station 10 and Back Again" 2001
18-channel B/W DVD video installation, mixed media
Sidén spent several weeks filming the daily activity at the fire station in Norrköping. What interested her here were not the moments of action when firemen use the skills we know them for. but the intervals between such alerts, the time spent in the station and out of the public gaze. This is a world of camaraderie and also of competition, a world like that of any other masculine group organized along military lines. Text excerpt by Julia Garimorth
(Seeing is a Trap 2001)
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"Prozim! Tschechisen Blumen" 2001
DVD with sound
Duration: 8 minutes, 54 seconds
This video was made on a summer weekend that we spent together. It shows Eva´s genuine talent for arranging flowers and also her physical struggle gathering them. And once again she surprises me with a gift.Ann-Sofi Sidén (2004)
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"Head Gallery Piss Up" 2001
DVD with sound
Duration: 11 minutes, 24 seconds
When the work was transferred to Galerie Christine König in Vienna, the installation process and handling of the sculpture were again documented in the film Head Gallery Piss Up. The artist marks the place where she wants the sculpture to be by peeing on the floor.Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"Untitled Studies" 2000
But the work also exists as a series of photographic studies of the artist squatting with her trousers around her ankles wearing a serious expression in an ironic pastiche on the photographic studies of the human body from the previous century, at the same time as insisting on making the female body that refuses adhere to aesthetic ideals visible.Text excerpt by Louise Wolthers (Framing Bodies – Surveilling Bodies: Photography as Control, Critique and Concern 2015)
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"Head Lake Piss Down" 2000
DVD with sound
Duration: 7 minutes, 26 seconds
There is an interesting progression, caught on video, as the figure is transported to Wanås in the trunk of a red car and installed by several workers.Excerpt by Gregory Volk (Camera Austria Nr 72, 2000)
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"Fideicommissum" 2000
Bronze Fountain
Peeing marks the space territorially, as animals do, but so too does Sidén´s crouching image, and by extension it infiltrates a culturewide, or worldwide, situation in which men in general occupy hugely skewed proportions of public space.Excerpt by Gregory Volk (Camera Austria Nr 72, 2000)
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"Turf Cupola" 1999-2000
Public sculpture commissioned by Stichtung Kunstwegen Hardenberg, Nordhorn
Installed in Neugnadenfeld, GermanyNot much remains of the camp except a forgotten cemetery, especially built for the prisoners. And the concrete foundation of the camps watchtower which became the instigating symbol and inspiration for Turf Cupola.
Ann-Sofi Sidén (2000)
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"Warte Mal!" 1999
13 channel DVD with 5 projections and 8 video booths
"I was staying in a motel in the mountains and all through the night long into the morning I could hear the girls scream, "Warte Mal!" (Hey Wait), probably one of the first German expressions the east European prostitutes learn when coming to the Czech-German border."Ann-Sofi Sidén (1999)
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"The Preparation" 1999
10 C-Prints and Video
Duration: 38 minutes
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"Day's Inn Projections" 1998/2001
Video Installation consisting of 5 DVDs, 5 DVD players, 5 projectors
In the evening, we just laid in bed watching the black and white image of people passing in and out of the hotel, a lot of business men. It was a pure pleasure to just view something that simple. Text excerpt by Ann-Sofi Sidén (Group Catalogue, Nuit Blanche 1998)
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"Who Told the Chambermaid" 1998
17 channel DVD synchronized video installation with mixed media
If taking the title as our guide we assume that this staging of surveillance is the chambermaid's own creation, then the work also brings about a power shift: from the current discussion about the power of the state or company over the individual to a situation in which it is, instead, the individual who looks and surveys.Text excerpt by Milou Allerholm, translated by Michael Garner (Nu: Siksi Index - The Nordic Art Review 1999)
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"Day's Inn" 1998
SONY B/W monitors, two 4-channel switchers, Formica on wood, linen, towels, toilet paper, plastic cups.
Passing a door, a dark hallway, a bathroom with fresh towels, a made-up bed, a night table, a TV, a balcony door. From one corner to the other, and back again. The air seems still, a given set, anonymous, with no traces of former guests. A light is switched on, and for a split second a man is visible in the hallway entering the door. As the camera moves back we catch a second glimpse of the man—he's now standing by the bed unpacking his luggage. The room is watching, still and quiet, a discrete collector watching yet another secret unfold.
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"The Test Chamber" 1997/2004
2 12-inch B/W NTSC surveillance monitors, 2 MAC Mini computers, network hub, shelf for monitors, cabling
QM is held in one of the rooms in the large home of the psychiatrist. The room becomes the cell where QM is examined. She is filmed by CCTV day and night, while the psychiatrist in the adjoining room monitors the muddy creature’s every movement.Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"QM, I Think I Call Her QM" 1997
DVD with sound, from 35 mm color film
Duration: 28 minutes
co-directed by Tony Gerber"Origin and age unknown. A body with a very rough skin type and mammal features. I think I’ll call her QM. I have never seen anything like her. She’s obviously of the female species and in pretty bad shape...
She seems to have a good sense of hearing despite the layers of mud, but she does not speak."
Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"Would a Course of Deprol Have Saved van Gogh's Ear?" 1996
Mixed media, including 406 C-prints, glass, MDF-boards, fluorescent light, and doors.
Deprol is a powerful drug, intended for patients suffering from depression or psychoses. It is possible that van Gogh's health might have been improved through medication – that is at any race the gist of the ad – but the world might possibly also have been deprived of his artistry.Text excerpt by Eric Van Der Heeg translated by Kjersti Board (Rooseum 1996)
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"Prop For World Picture II" 1996
Ready-made, fruit box, toilet paper, surveillance monitor, VHS tape, running time 3 hours.
The shop owner locks the store from the outside and pulls down the shutters right before our eyes, and we are alone in the abandoned shop. Trapped inside the object.Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"QM The Clocktower" 1995
DVD with sound, from 16 mm film
Duration: 2 minutes, 40 seconds
Her body language gravitates to floor level, she crawls around on all four, she loses her ability to communicate verbally and becomes more and more impulsive, like a timorous, wild animal. QM is impossible to define in terms of primitive or civilized. She cannot be categorized according to the western world's way of branding the foreign as primitive, as opposed to western, rationality. Sidén lets QM be a character with an ever-evolving mythology. "I don't know if I found her or invented her..."Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"It's By Confining One's Neighbor That One is Convinced of One's Own Sanity II" 1995
Mixed Media
The title of the installation alludes to a quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky:
"It is Not By Confining One's Neighbor That One is Convinced of One's Own Sanity"Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"53 West 9th Street (The Psychiatrist's House)" 1994-2004
Set of 8 C-Prints
I started to look for a place in the house to begin my work, and I settled on Mrs. Fabian's bedroom, located on the 3rd floor, with two windows overlooking the garden. During my tiresome efforts moving the books up from the library into the bedroom I found new inscriptions penned directly on one of the walls: "Monitoring Station #51 W 9th St." On the opposite wall were two other inscriptions marked "Monitoring Station #55 W 9th St." Well aware of the fact that I myself was in a house at 53 W 9th Street, I got a strange yet ambiguous feeling—like a modern archeologist, ready to excavate the remnants of my own age, but without yet having the proper necessary perspective.Text excerpt from the preface in No. 144, Ann-Sofi Sidén
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"It's By Confining One's Neighbor That One is Convinced of One's Own Sanity I" 1994
Mixed Media
"For many years following the death of her husband, Alice E Fabian lived and worked alone in the townhouse, where she gradually developed a paranoia that seems sprung from the security-paranoia of the McCarthy era. Her neighbors’ movements, children playing outside the front door, messages on the answering machine – everything was interpreted as aggressive disturbances or attempts to spy on her.The remnants Ann-Sofi Sidén found in the building reveal a woman whose grasp on reality showed severe paranoid traits and serious alienation. Her contact with the outside world receded."
Text excerpts from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"Good Morning America" 1994
Video Installation consisting of 5 DVDs, 5 DVD players, 5 32" monitors, synchronization and shelving system
A Portable Play for Five Monitors. Five men are stuffed each into a small monitor, placed one on top of another. The men awaken, exchange unpleasantries, share a cigarette, pinch each other and quarrel over whether or not America is to be found on the map. The interplay between the men confounds the framework provided by the monitors --- both sound and actions transcend them --- and they proceed to share a monotonous existence, repeated until someone turns off the power.Maria Lind (1994)
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"Alice Polaroids" 1994
Set of 16 C-prints, taken from 8 polaroids (front and back)
8 polaroid images, some of them all black, and some of them taken from different windows in the house, showing details of the street outside the building.
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"Codex" 1993
11 Text Plates, 11 Photos (B/W), plus 1 DVD
Historical facts surrounding 11 court cases, where women from the Middle Ages to the 19th century are punished, spill over into the artist's fable. The fact that these women are only visible in history because they broke the law also makes the project important in women's history.
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"Sofi's Room" 1991
Mixed media audio and mechanical
"The Room is my room where I work to a pulse. It is closed, with a high ceiling, and only one single, tight entrance or exit. I see it as a room that I work my way out of, but which I have to be in, I was forced into it, driven to the point where I had made this room, I had to perform such a pointless activity as mechanically repeating my own identity. It conveys hanging back, waiting."Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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"QM at the Art Fair" 1990
S-VHS transfer, DVD with sound
Duration: 9 minutes
Half human, half animal, naked and smeared from top to toe in wet soil, she interferes in human affairs and thereby subverts taken-for-granted assumptions about human subjectivity and societal integration.Text excerpt by Max Liljefors (In between the Human and the Animal: Subjectivity and Authority in Ann-Sofi Sidéns Queen of Mud Project 2012)
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"179 kg" 1990
Performance, plexiglass gelatin-filled cubes on wheels
Three women sitting side by side on a bench, with minimal conversation that reaches its height in the moment when, after one woman leaves, the other two engage in gossip.
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"QM at NK" 1989
VHS transfer, DVD with sound
Duration: 4 minutes, 24 seconds
A security guard suddenly approaches QM with the question: "Do you have permission?" His utterance pinpoints the inability of an institutional order to tolerate intermediate positions such as QM’s. The guard’s question can only be answered by yes or no; either you are bestowed with the appropriate mandate or not, there is no in-between. QM refuses to reply though, and steps over to another counter, evading confrontation.Text excerpt by Max Liljefors (In between the Human and the Animal: Subjectivity and Authority in Ann-Sofi Sidén's Queen of Mud Project 2012)
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"Greetings to the Swedish Farmers and their Asian Women II" 1988
Performance
In cause of a small notice that I read in a newspaper… Where it was told about a Swedish farmer, who had tethered his Asian woman, naked, in a chain beside the cattle in his cow house…Ann-Sofi Sidén (1988)
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"Greetings to the Swedish Farmers and their Asian Women I" 1988
Performance
By first uncovering and then marking out the contours of a female body on a piece of wood, sawing it out, and putting it up for sale as an object in the street, Sidén delineates the fundament of the western art tradition – on the one hand, the attitude to woman as a nude model/object, to woman as the sign of nature that the artist, through his interpretation, controls, depicts and transforms into art; on the other, the crass, commercial aspects, as demonstrated by the sale of the object; but also, on a more personal level, a development from painting to performance and rather a conceptual species of activism. Sidén herself calls this an "anti-pedestal sculpture".Text excerpt from (Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Between the Best of Worlds 2004)
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