Untitled (Horizontal Sliding), 2000A recurring element in Jonas Dahlberg's works is the methodology of surveillance. The role of a surveillance camera is to prevent crime and its presence testifies to a more abstract fear that exists in society. Jonas Dahlberg mentions in his notes, from his film in the 2000 Benthams Panopticon, the 19th century's prison structure where a centrally positioned observation post made it possible to survey every single prisoner, as well as instilling the concept that if one knew one was being observed, then one was disciplined. The artist has utilised the same architectural construction in the two films showing at Index, where a DV camera, rotating 360 degrees, is placed in the centre of a model structure. However the finished films accentuate the viewer and his gaze, rather than a paranoid insight of being subjected to continuous surveillance. In presentation, the scale of the filmed models shifts, by projection, to a 1:1 scale in relation to the exhibition space. This provides a more ambivalent relationship to reality and to the viewer, with associations to Wilhelm Hammershøis painted, low-key interiors and to cinematic precedents. These references cover both the mode of procedure current in cinematic practise as well as the films psychological content. Jonas Dahlberg´s film installations bear a distant kinship with the same sort of hypnotic effect that is experienced, for example, in Stanley Kubrick´s The Shining with the camera's thrilling journey through a corridor system, or in Chantal Akerman´s more tranquil documentary-like narratives of hotel interiors in the film Hotel Monterey from 1973.
Mats Stjernstedt
Safe Zones No. 7, The toilets at ZKM, 2001 installation, monitor, Camera. ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 2001.From Book : T.Y. Levin, U. Frohne, P. Weibel, 2002, [CTRL] SPACE Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ZKM Center for the Art and Media, Karlshruhe, Germany; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, p.128-133.
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