Exhibition at Nuda Gallery

“The sun has just risen in the east. The palm-like tree, around which the other trees have been removed, casts peculiar shadows. With her face turned towards the east, enraptured, the priestess sits on one of the rare natural objects and plants arranged as a seat. Slowly and rhythmically, a few strange, constantly repeating sounds flow from her lips.”
– Rudolf Steiner

Everything that arises in time has its origin in the eternal. The eternal is not accessible to sensory perception, but once upon a time, in the early development of humanity, she was connected to all other living things through the life force. Imagine a seed. Inside it slumbers the power that makes the stalk sprout. The life force flows through all living things. During this time, humans had not yet developed their own impulses; the will was only in its inception. What drove them to their actions was their inner voices or what plants, animals, stones, winds, clouds, and the whispers of the trees told them.

Chapter two in the exhibition series “The Akasha Chronicle” portrays the immanent energy of nature – the etheric body – and seeks to give form to the idiom of nature. Rudolf Steiner suggests that the origin of language lies in something resembling song, that it was the power of thought and the inherent rhythm of nature that were shaped into audible sounds by the priestesses who could interpret them in the early days. In Simon Sjöström’s work “Transmission,” we hear the collective voice of nine trees: a spruce, a birch, and seven pines. The recordings were made on January 17, 2022, at the top of Rävfjäll in Tiveden National Park between 4:22 PM and 5:22 PM. Each tree had its own oscillating circuit connected to its roots to let the electrical signals the trees use to communicate with each other control pitch and waveform.

Both Hanna Antonsson and Simon Sjöström are drawn to revive the dead and, in their art, give it sound or movement. In the series of works called “Autowing,” Hanna Antonsson has revived roadkills by creating robotic cyborgs, constantly in motion without taking flight. The exhibition “Immanent Energy” is about listening and trying to hear, about conveying messages between lower and upper worlds, just like the squirrel Ratatosk or Hermes, to bring back to the surface the senses that were once lost to us and let us be filled with the vitality of all living things.

The exhibition series Akashic Chronicle has emerged from the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner’s book of the same title. In the book, written between 1904 and 1906, the author challenges the cosmic mystery. Rudolf Steiner takes on the ambitious task of describing the evolution of the universe, and especially human development through the four essential parts: The physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the spirit. Through four exhibitions in the sign of the essential parts, we resign ourselves to the arms of mysticism and align ourselves with the longing human soul’s need to seek a higher worldview, beyond materialism, beyond the transient individuality. Through the four exhibitions of Akashic Chronicle, we move closer to the essence of human spirit and the eternal weave of the soul.