Magnus Wallin »Magnus Wallin«

To see the videos by the Swedish artist Magnus Wallin is to follow an Odyssey through the different interpretations of the human body through the history of Western art. In one video the bodies seems to fetched out of a Medieval depiction of the infernal consequences of Original sin, in yet another, we are met by a neo-classical vision of the male human body as the origin of every aesthetic system. In one work we stand in front of a Rationalist version of the body as an element of a divine taxonomy or mathesis universalis, and in the other we see the body as in Paul Virilio's theories about the body as a cog in the totalitarian metabolical machines that defined totalitarian political systems during the last century.

Wallin's films - that stirred a huge interest during the 2001 Istanbul Biennial - uses modern computer animation techniques in order to build up landscapes of an expressive and striking beauty. He uses architectural elements - often with a manifest historical reference - as a backdrop against which a ferocious plot is played out and where the viewer is challenged, not to say provoked, both as a biological creature and a cultural (not say existential or moral) being.