Björn Lövin - The Reconstructed Installations
Bjorn Lovin - Consumer in Infinity and Mr P Hoard - 1971
From 2 April to 18 September 2022, Moderna Museet in Stockholm presents "Björn Lövin - The Surrounding Reality", an exhibition that reconstructs three of Björn Lövin's (1937-2009) most important art installations.
Source: Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Image: Björn Lövin, “Consumer in Infinity and "Mr. P’s Hoard"”. Installation view, Moderna Museet, 1971 © Björn Lövin Photo: Erik Cornelius
Björn Lövin was one of Sweden's leading installation artists, whose "Consumer in infinity and ‘Mr. P's Money’" was shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1971, an exhibition he repeated the following year at the Liljevalchs Konsthall. As is often the case with many works of this type, this installation - like others by Lövin - has not survived to the present day, a reason to which the Moderna Museet attributes part of the relative lack of knowledge of the artist among the general public.
From 2 April to 18 September 2022, the Moderna Museet is reconstructing this installation, together with "L'Image - Exposition de Björn Lövin pour International Life Assurance Company ILAC" (exhibited at the Pompidou in Paris in 1971) and "C - The Struggle for Reality", shown at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm in 1988, composing an exhibition that has been possible thanks to the study of the existing photographic material of the works, as well as several interviews with Björn Lövin's family and friends. In fact, the exhibition's press release warns that "the installations that are now in place in the main gallery at Moderna Museet are merely interpretations of Lövin’s environments".
"Together, the three environments in the exhibition raise issues and questions that are as urgent today as they were then. Relationships between individual and system, personal and collective, are explored, along with the increasingly dissolved boundary between fiction and reality. The gap between the welfare state and consumer society and excluded groups is revealed. Underpinning all the works is the recurring question: Whose reality is it?"
The exhibition curator, Matilda Olof-Ors, explains: “Through these worlds, Lövin portrays and comments upon the surrounding reality, interweaving complex social critique and existential issues. He merges fiction and contemporary phenomena, revolutionary ideas meet hope-inspiring ones, and the demandingly sincere is mixed with playfulness. All the works demonstrate Lövin’s way of looking at and using art to formulate critical thinking and give expression to resistance”

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