No Title, To many Questions, by Malin Arnell

presented at EDGE seminary Artist Talk

Uppsala City and Municipal Theatre

Malin Anrell gave a provoking performance in the Artist talk Uppsala Municipal Theatre breaking the conventions of dialogue by shifting herself to an arrogant young boy, who refused to respond in English, which was the announced language of the talk. As he had nothing much to say, no one bothered to translate his answers and the international guests at the talk of course didn't understand much. Or, rather, the strong impact and mental distress caused by Anrell's experiment in social psychology, when she silently entered the private sphere of ordinary people in acts of absurd intimacy, was delivered to the people attending the discussion as pure as could ever be wished.

Anrell spent the day in the centre of Uppsala, dressed in the clothes of this boy, a student of hers, who seems to have provoked the artist by asking to many questions, walking around and silently entering other peoples lives. She could take place between to men having a chat on a sofa, and just sit there silent. Or, she approached a mother walking her baby in a pusher taking a hold of the handle of the carriage, as if she was the real owner of the kid. Through actions like these the team of photographers luring around could document a social an psychological drama as it was played out in reality.

- If an art work like this was presented i Poland, Arti Grabowski said, addressing the boy on stage as the artist, there would be personal risks ivolved, as people i Poland are prepared to defend their privacy in a more resolute way than the Swedes.

Chivalrously he invited the artist to give the piece a try in his home country. In retrospect I find Grabowskis comment more expressive than at first. He gave voice to our collective anger, by inviting the arrogant boy to have a good beating up by strangers in a foreign country. And this time the boy responded in English.

-"No", he simply said.

But Grabowski was the only one to react on the flagrant exchange of persons. Everybody was thinking of it all the time, and somebody like me tried in vain to see a likeness, and recognize the same person on the scene as in the pictures projected behind him. It was like a bad dream. Ever since, I have this tendency to react with disgust on strangers coming to close to me, but I hide my feelings carefully. The work had a long term impact on me, if it was an artwork in the first place. A Performance it certainly was.