LB°27 — News
Throughout its almost 35 years, the Luleå Biennial has presented works of all kinds, and some of them have caused more of a stir than others. Lars Lundqvist's three-day stay in an ice house in 2006 is one of the more talked-about works from the biennial's early years.
During what was then called the Luleå Winter Biennial in 2006, Luleå artist Lars Lundqvist participated with the work The Wall. The artwork took the form of a roofless house out on the ice, built of snow and with semi-transparent windows of ice, where Lundqvist would sit trapped and alone for three days. He saw the audience only as blurry outlines on the other side of the thick ice panes, and they had to shout loudly to be able to have conversations with him over the several-meter-high walls of snow.
The work aimed to have the audience, and the artist himself, reflect on the phenomenon of walls and questions about confinement, whether voluntary or forced. What does it really mean to build a wall? Who do we build walls for? Does a wall shut someone out or does it shut us in?
In an interview with Norrländska Socialdemokaten in 2014, Lundqvist said that he had ultimately started hallucinating inside the ice house, and that years later he was still approached by people who had spoken to him from the other side of the wall. Ricky Sandberg, one of the members of the Kilen Art Group who arranged the 2006 biennial, remembers the artwork well.
“We were worried that he would freeze to death in there. We had a ladder close at hand and climbed up every now and then to peek over the edge of the wall and see if he was okay.”
Lundqvist kept his fire burning and made it through the stay without any major issues. The work’s dramatic finale took place in connection with the biennial’s opening on March 4. A hole was drilled in one of the walls of the ice house and a rope was threaded through. From the inside, the artist attached the rope to a large plank and then the audience had to pull the rope, tearing down the wall and setting the artist free.
Eight years later, the work was resurrected in connection with the inauguration of the Capital of Culture Year in Umeå 2014. This time, the stay in the ice house was somewhat shorter and a tractor was used to free the artist.
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Do you have your own memories from the Luleå Biennial that you would like to share? Please contact us with your stories and pictures to paulina.granat@konstframjandet.se.