Anna Lundh

Front-time Reworkings #1
(The Swedish word for "future", framtid, literally translates as “front-time”).

Last year, I discovered that my studio in Lower Manhattan was located just a few feet from where Öyvind Fahlström and Barbro Östlihn had been living and working in the 1960s – on 128 Front Street. I was researching various projects involving Swedish artists in New York, focusing mainly on records of these artists' working methods and how time can transform the meaning of such documents. Barbro Östlihn would walk up and down the streets of Lower Manhattan and take pictures with her Kodac camera. They were pictures of buildings, in-between spaces, walls. Some of these photographs would then serve as inspiration and reference for her much different, often quite abstract paintings. I decided to focus rather on the discarded images, which she had still kept – perhaps as a memory of a work process, or of a city that is constantly changing.

By playing the role of a detective, I went on a mission to locate the sites, using only the photographs as leads. A revision of the material from the future means working with it as my material, and I was also employing a similar method; walking the streets, observing, searching. I then placed posters of Östlihn's original photos onto their corresponding sites – no matter how changed the environment had become – using them as backdrops for what is played out in the present. The video documentation of this action, including the investigation as well as archival footage, attempts to mimic a comic strip, where the past, the present and the future are superimposed and visible simultaneously.