Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena

Rőda Sten is proud to present its second large scale production of the year, The South Will Rise Again – the first comprehensive solo exhibition in Gőteborg, Sweden, of Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena (born in Montevideo, Uruguay, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden).

Known for his video and photographic works, Fabra Guemberena has developed a complex visual expression, incorporating a rich variety of mediums spanning from sound to performance, sculpture and collage.

In a spectacular site-specific installation, created for the exhibition hall The Cathedral at Rőda Sten, drifting between nature and society and resembling a cabinet of wonders, Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena investigates our uncanny fascination with mystic and modern terrors. In an endless flow, images supplant each other while items as different as self-made ambiguous structures, collages of press clips and gathered imagery, military apparatuses and camouflage clad figures, museum cabinets, pornography and stuffed animals, mount up to a bewildering wonder cabinet. Through the mere movement among the myriad of objects in the space, the visitor him/herself becomes an active part of the gigantic installation, set against large theater backdrops, while in an interplay between images and objects, the artist tries to escape semantics and confuse the consensus of our linguistic reality.

This universe created by Fabra Guemberena thus resembles a construction that is inspired by and posited somewhere in between a Gesamtkunstwerk, an Artaudian 'Theater of Cruelty,' and a symbol laden, cult universe. Yet the installation escapes categorization and goes beyond each and every one of them; it rather seems to be coming out of a Pasolinian inspired 'image/object dictionary' in which every item, image or object, seen in itself, is an impenetrable signifier that can function and exist only in relation to the other surrounding signifiers, thus reconstructing in the larger picture of the installation that uncanny locus of signifiers: the collective unconscious.

Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena graduated with an MFA from the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2002. He has since participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, among which the Venice Biennial in 2003, Prague Biennial in 2005, and The Moderna Exhibition in 2006.

The exhibition is curated by Edi Muka.

Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena
The South Will Rise Again
Kurator: Edi Muka