Anna Lundh

Front-time Reworkings #1

In the 1960s, Swedish artists Öyvind Fahlström and Barbro Östlihn had a studio on 128 Front Street in Lower Manhattan. By investigating records of Östlihn’s working method, i.e. photographs of buildings and walls, the project focuses on how time can transform the value and meaning of such documents. And what it means to "rework" an artistic method/work material from a future perspective.

Barbro Östlihn would walk up and down the streets of Lower Manhattan and take pictures with her Kodac camera: images 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. Even though Östlihn never showed these photographs, she had still kept them – perhaps as a memory of a work process, or of a city that is constantly changing.

In 2009, I went on a mission to locate the sites, using Östlihn's discarded photographs as my only guide. I was 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 would play out in the present.

"Front-Time Reworkings” is a 3 channel video documentation of this action, including the investigation as well as archival footage, mimicing the basic premise of the comic strip –where the past, the present and the future are superimposed and visible simultaneously. (The Swedish word for ”future”– framtid – literally translates as “front-time”).