Underskog

The Cabinet – theater version (2010-2011)
HD film 26:00 mins

The Cabinet is about instincts, origin, hidden and suppressed feelings and smallest denominator of man – a state where we are all equal. It asks us to turn to an unconscious level between desire and disgust, between logic and irrational behavior. A cacophony where everything fits the back aswell as the educated and structured front.

Throught the film’s cabinet we travel into a common internal space that unites us in an original creative source – a kind of birth of the Artpiece. The title refers to older times curio cabinet or “A Cabinet for Curiosities,” a place where you simply enjoyed the things that meant something special, secluded from the rest of the world, often primitive, unknown and variegated things.

If the cabinet in The Cabinet symbolizes a person’s body, so does the mud, clay and other fluids in the piece stand as a symbol of the ”glue” or the invisible medium for our communication channel. The unformulated chaos allowing the entry of a final result.

Civilization – The Pleasure Principle (2013)
HD film 10:00 min

In Civilization – The Pleasure Principle (2013) hypnotic prone pictures emerges of the actual dirt we throw away from us through well-developed sewagetreatment systems we are taking for granted. Its’s filmed in and around wastewater treatment plants. Layers of social criticism are intertvined with a fascination for our contemporary’s abilities of denial and utter waste. This work deals with purity and danger, pleasure and pain and where to draw the line between those.
Its also unfolding an unawareness most of us live under, where we thoughtlessly produce dirt and expect pure and drinkable water in a tap everywhere. Throughout the ongoing flow and never cessation of these brown liguids and filthy dirty surfaces bred a kind of trance, which takes us beyond logic and reason.
Suddenly we see only a flow of different smudges, blasted rock walls, solitary plants representing a luxuriant nature, a pumping, one upside down, one in and out. Where am I? The footage and the music moves us to a place beyond space and time, it is real, but as a different sort of reality.

The Quest for Presence (2013)
HD film 19:37 mins
The Quest for Presence is originally shown as diptych, where the film stands in dialogue with a large pierced broken wall. A thin layer of smoke and dust from the pierced wall emphasize the sensation of a kind of zeroed state, a kind of past and present at the same time.

Inspired by movements of trance dance, this piece is meant to portray a state of transition and spirituality, and with that also highlight the possibility to achieve a feeling of total and complete presence only appears if you allow to lay bare yourself. Let loose of expectations. This work revolve around breakthrough and purification, complexity of man, and a place where time stops to exist. A group of strangers meet and for a moment they unify and transcend into a common materia. The price is to leave the norm as you know it and let go, if only for a moment. It’s about suspence in both a material and a dramatical sense

Åsa Cederqvist is a visual artist who works with various materials in order to modify the meaning thereof to create new platforms for communication and to transpose power structures.

With a background as electro-pop singer of the DIY scene of early 00 along with her experience as a director of commercial films (2001), Cederqvist oeuvre has not limits. She employs a range of practices in her work, including sculpting, working within a tradition of Expanded Cinema and those of a performer. The sculptural work differs from sculpting in a conventional sense, as it manifests as spatial experience, embodiment and activism.