pre-2000 | Cecilia Parsberg

Who wants to be like mum and dad?

A young family with 3 children in Gothenburg started a gallery at their home. They invited one artist per month to exhibit in their home during one year. The gallery At home was open when the family was there. A calendar was made for the following year with a picture and a description of each artist’s project.

I made a T-shirt to each member of the family to put on whenever a visitor came. On the T-shirts there were a face of me blowing up my cheeks, and the text: Who wants to be like mum and dad?
On their TV I showed a video of an animated heart blowing up and down, in and out. The question on the T-shirt started a discussion between the members of the family. Their six year old daughter said she wanted to be like mum and dad, their eleven year old daughter declared that she wanted to be herself. Their two month old son was busy sucking the breast of his mum. The parents were relating the question to their children and also relating it to their own mother and father.

The members of the family wore the piece and became the actual piece, encompassing the visitors.

During this month the family had many discussions with the visitors about family relationships. The family is very sociable and one could always sit down and get a cup of tea or a glass of wine. There were always people coming in, they perhaps did not know each other very well, or even not at all but they came to talk, and to give advice to each other about personal matters.

Those who hunger for life (Painting the landscape), performance and video piece 1994.

A performance in front of the videocamera (6:24 mins) and in front of the camera and a series of 5 photographs is produced.

Those who hunger for life revolves around a number of slow-motion shots of the artist spitting-cum-spraying gushing globs of primary coloured paint. Once again, there is an obvious connection to the splatter painting, and a more general expressionist tendency of giving direct and immediate voice to the primary creative processes. Parsberg takes the idea further by exploring emotional states conveyed by each chosen colour and tracing other implicit allusions (to primitivism, vampirism etc.). Text in Fresh – a film and video touring programme in UK.

The video had its latest screenings 2022 in a group show at Hasselblads Konsthall Gothenburg. Mörkrum/Svartklubb and they wrote:

During the period 1985-95, photography in Sweden underwent major changes. It was the era of postmodernism, when a conceptual approach was seriously established, when women artists and photographers really took their place, and when the world of photography and art began to unite. It was a time of resistance. The medium of photography was mixed with performance and video.

It was originally made for an exhibition at Uddevalla Konstmuseum, then at Stockholm Art Fair, received Maria Bonnier Dahlins stipendium for young artists 1966 as well as Otto och Charlotte Mannheimers stipendium. Then screened on tour in the UK. In Sweden at: SMART Show for New Reality Mix Stockholm. ’Blått snitt’ Moderna Museet Stockholm. Endurance Kulturhuset and The Modern Dance Theatre Stockholm. Gothenburg Filmfestival and ”New Reality Mix” Stockholm. Again in the UK in FRESH video compilation on tour: 5 days at the ICA, London / Videopositive-95, Liverpool / Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff / Ikon Gallery Birmingham / Tate Gallery London. Ferens Art Gallery Hull / Open Hand Studios, Reading / National Film Theatre in London / Ruskin SFA Oxford. The Arches Glasgow. In Centro Reina Sofia Madrid. At Arnolfini Center, Bristol. In the show ”Elektroniske underströmmer” Statens Museum for Kunst Copenhagen. 2016 at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm. (…and more, check CV for more details)
I was trained as a painter for eight years. In the history men have been painting landscape — overlooking it, viewing it, as well as overlooking the female body. The work is a play with the idea of/the image of/ the imagination that the female is more obsessed by the emotional, the interior…. Here the woman spits and spurts boundlessly, uncontrollably and soil sometimes the camera lens (the gaze) with color.