Susanna Jablonski works with sculpture, moving images and spatial installations.

Her works, which are an interplay between material, image and language, simultaneously express the most monumental and the everyday. In tactile, sculptural scenes, the artist takes on questions of time and history, of collective experiences of grief and struggle.

Long Time Listener, First Time Caller echos with the history of “Tyskmagasinen” (the German warehouses), two buildings that were appropriated by the Nazi army as it passed between Finland and Norway. In 2016 the warehouses were burned to the ground (for still unknown reasons). Until then, these quiet witnesses to the Swedish involvement in the Second World War had remained a physical contradiction to Sweden’s presumed neutrality.

From the desolate site in Karlsvik outside Luleå where the buildings once stood, Jablonski has collected objects from the fire: shards of glass, charred wood, molten metal.

The installation Long Time Listener, First Time Caller was produced for the Luleå Biennial 2020: Time on Earth and is now being shown at Kalmar konstmuseum in a new setting and form. Jablonski’s works are being juxtaposed with a series of iron sculptures by the artist Elisabeth Jablonska, whose art was shown at Kalmar konstmuseum in the 1990s. In the exhibition, a link is formed between personally experienced time and historical time. How can the past be made present and perceptible? Susanna Jablonski connects fragments, bodies and testimonies that together speak of communal realities and contexts that condition our existence.

The exhibition Long Time Listener, First Time Caller also includes works by Elisabeth Jablonska, and artistic collaborations with William Rickman and Cara Tolmie.

Curator: Karin Bähler Lavér