Jesper Nordahl Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, 2001 // Johan Zetterquist Making a Sculpture with the Help of a Legal Drug // Thomas Demand Kabine // Marc Bijl Terrorresist // Hassan Khan Read Fanon You Fuckingbastards // Katarina Löfström; UnFolded Flying Object (UFFO), 2004 // Børre Sæthre Site project no 7

Jesper Nordahl Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, 2001 Apart from being a network of expressways connecting the city center of Tokyo with more remote districts, Metropolitan Expressway is also a series of photographs and a video installation by Jesper Nordahl. The distinct profile of the expressway has been caught in the camera’s eye as it cuts through the cityscape, embodying yesterday’s visionary conception of the future, which first emerged at the time of the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964. According to the “Annual Report 2000” of Nihon Doro Kodan/Japan Expressway Public Corporation, this expressway system not only respects topographical and geological conditions (each section of the expressway being built to withstand earthquakes), but it also respects inter-human and environmental relations, with high-level traffic security, soundbarriers and underground tunnels, when necessary. Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway is a kind of architectural archetype, and such items have been fascinating for Jesper Nordahl in other cases, resulting in several series of works. One example would be the series on the practical conglomerations of gas stations and mosques (Gasoline and God, 2000), or the documentation of buildings in the Latvian city of Karosta (2001), once a Russian military port, today a place for free trade. Since 1993, this city has been the object of a project called “CCMS” (Committee on the Challenge of a Modern Society) – however with the grim addition: “clean up project.” These places are all characterized by somehow being in a state of political, economical, or cultural transition, places where the architecture sometimes reflects its surroundings, and sometimes not. According to Nihon Doro Kodan/Japan Expressway Public Corporation (section ”Process of Construction") it normally takes 10 to 15 years to complete the construction of an expressway. At present, after nearly forty years, 128.4 kilometers of the express way are still under construction. In spite of this, Jesper Nordahl’s photographs do not provide the viewer with any sense of transcendence, they don’t tell us that the expressway will have changed dramatically when the photographer next returns to Japan to resume his documentary work. The photographs and the videos are always done by using a stationary camera and in static profile: you never experience the feeling of the intensive circulatory system that the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway constitutes in the city. The works become a stubborn and formally conscious portrayal according to vertical and horizontal coordinates, with the sky as an ever present and final backdrop. In Delirious New York (1978), Rem Koolhaas praises the city for having finally replaced nature with artifice. With its “incomplete” (perhaps “incompleted” would be a better word) and vertically ascendant topography, Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway displays qualities that also could be found in Koolhaas’s “Generic City,” but it undoubtedly belongs to reality, and Jesper Nordahl’s photographs underline this fact once more. Mats Stjernstedt is Director of Index in Stockholm ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Johan Zetterquist Making a Sculpture with the Help of a Legal Drug, 2002 Art is philosophy become flesh. This applies exceptionally well to the world of Johan Zetterquist. Sublime narratives are created by a wide array of different media compiled: drawings; sounds; videos; sculptures as well as wall-paintings. The organic growths in his sculptures might at first make you wonder whether someone slipped something in your drink yesterday, but at second glance it stirs up thoughts about how nature and culture irresistibly and ultimately melt together – or not. The slightly surreal, eerie feeling one is left with after visiting an installation by Zetterquist matches the complete fascination with how real and the unreal fit so nicely together, and that the flipside of normality holds sway so close to the normal. But then again – what is normal and who the …really cares about normality? Here the documentation of the performance, Making a Sculpture with the Help of a Legal Drug, is presented as a SITE-project. The ludicrousness of the concept of “legal drugs” is emphasized in the title of the project, where the killer-design added to the table adds up to the post-production piece. The table will be present at the Berlin Art Forum. Power Ekroth ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Thomas Demand Kabine, 2002 ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Marc Bijl Terrorresist, 2003 Artists are the freaks who don’t fit within the framework of any other profession – according to one of my very best friends, who is an artist. He reasons thus: the artist isn’t sick enough to end up in a mental institution, but must rather be institutionalized in another sort of category, a no-man’s-land between normal and non-normal, in order to be categorized at all: the art world. Artists conduct themselves in accordance with the rules, or non-rules, that exist in this world. Here, an action which, in another context, would perhaps have been denounced as being for example destructive or morally repugnant can be legitimized or even declared a stroke of genius. The locations and places which are put at the disposal of artists are often nearly sacred; here one would rather whisper, and we gladly allow ourselves to be swept away by Art with a capital A. This is where art is separated from what must be denounced as non-art. To the extent that art defies the existing framework, it becomes in fact more difficult to establish something that frames it – a kind of architecture. After having spent some time paging through an issue of the magazine Flash Art last summer, I started to wonder who had succeeded in bribing the editorial board — and how much money it took — into writing exclusively on the Dutch artist Marc Bijl. This time it turned out to be an extremely well-done facsimile of the magazine designed by Marc Bijl himself, complete with advertisements and small news items (all about Bijl). He made use of, or rather appropriated, the trademark “Flash Art” and made it “his own,” just as he did with other trademarks in various actions in Berlin’s public space. Near Alexanderplatz, on the public basketball court, under the cover of darkness, he painted the rims and the circles at midfield, with Adidas logos in white on blue. Normally these spots are painted (and sponsored) by Nike, with the company’s logos in black on red. It ended up as being a matter for the police. Marc Bijl’s contribution to Manifesta 4 (spring, 2002), the work Resist, was sprayed directly on the colonnade in front of the entrance to the art hall, Portikus, in Frankfurt, where part of the exhibition was shown. On September 11, 2002, Bijl showed the work Terror at the portico of Fridericianum, where parts of the exhibition Documenta XI were underway. The work was there for three hours before it was washed away. The documentation of both works has been gathered together into a new work: TerrorResist, which constitutes SITE Project Number 4 and is presented on the next spread. Power Ekroth ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Hassan Khan Read Fanon You Fuckingbastards, 2003 ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Katarina Löfström; UnFolded Flying Object (UFFO), 2004 To be used at your own discretion: the Unfolded Flying Object (UFFO) is as yet unidentified, and maybe it will even fly if you follow the instructions. Does it consist of a sheet of paper in its viriginal state (an "un-," i.e. not folded paper), or one that has been folded and unfolded? The object has three states: not.folded, folded, and unfolded. It is thus definitively, once and for all unfinished, already completed even though it has not yet begun its transformation. In fact, any sheet of pape is as such infinite, a receptacle for writing, drawing, painting, but also stins of various kinds: wine, water, semen, blood... But it also replete with things, imges, traces of figures, expectations and clichés. The erasure of content does just as little empty the sheet as the manic scribbling succeeds in filling it; both actions have the same value. Sven-Olov Wallenstein ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Børre Sæthre Site project no 7 The Norwegian artist Børre Sæthre has a series of outstanding exhibitions behind him, and has embarked on an international career. Quite often the installations, or structures, are spectacular, and they are made with painstaking precision. For the large exhibition at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo some years ago, a crew of 35 people worked on the preparations day and night for two weeks. Accord-ing to the perfectionist Sæthre, an additional two weeks would have been needed in order to get everything just right. The exhibition consisted of a hyper-real installation where one wandered through a kind of high-tech landscape that suggested films like Kubrick’s 2001, or the spaceship Enterprise. After having passed through corridors, soundless sliding doors, rooms with monitors showing films in slow-motion with silent gas explosions, surrounded by a high frequency sound that makes its way into the brain, one entered a giant blue room. At the end of the room, a declining white (stuffed) unicorn was preening itself in the most voluptuous way. It was a slightly surreal experience, and the enormous installation gave the visitor an impression of a totality, something that is quite uncommon. The introduction in Power Ekroths interview with Børre Sæthre ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................