Sofia Hultén
Super Call Me Fragile Ego

The work of Sofia Hultén is driven by an experimental questioning of the things we encounter in everyday life. Hultén’s raw objects usually come to her second- hand, sourced online or found on the street. They bear marks of a previous life, suggesting hidden potentials and parallel possibilities in their compositional re- arrangements. Her materials often appear as fragments of a larger frame of ac- tivity, similar to a chapter in a longer storyline. Many of her works are brain- teasing, sometimes humorous demonstrations of the ways in which art, often more so than philosophy or science, can mediate between abstract reasoning and aesthetic experience.

In her third solo-exhibition at the gallery Hultén presents two distinct groups of works which perhaps, more than ever, draw on personal experiences and per- spectives. A series of kinetic sculptures, all titled Manly Rainy Moany, consist of wildly spinning bleached jeans attached to street poles which are animated by blowing air from drain-like grids below. These sculptures gyrate with the contra- dictions and discrepancies inherent in skinhead youth culture Hultén grew up alongside in Birmingham, England. Tying this to the upskirt-phenomenon these works subtly transform Hultén’s recollections into an absurd theater of uncon- trolled, unintended and somewhat helpless movements – a pole dancing pan- orama of a different kind that humorously points to the ridiculous hollowness and vanity of a childish ideology which was largely driven by an outdated and ultra- conservative sense of masculinity.