Henrik Håkansson

Last February and March, the Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson visited the Montes Azules, El Triunfo, and Monarch Butterfly biosphere reserves in Mexico. There he registered the flora and fauna that he found with motion-detection cameras, a still camera, a digital video recorder, and sound-recording equipment. The resulting documentation serves as a kind of journal of the artist’s experience and is displayed at this museum in the form of test shots and recordings that emphasize relationships between time and space. Images of jaguars, tapirs, deer, and various species of birds, maps pinpointing the exact locations where both pictures and videos were taken, and sound pieces played through high-tech audio systems make a spectacle of the minutiae of the artist’s labor and his environment. The title of the exhibition, “The Jungle Novels,” references a literary genre that developed in Latin America in the 1920s, in which authors narrated encounters between civilization and nature, simultaneously drawing attention to the consequences of deforestation and exploitation. Håkansson’s exhibition proposes a somewhat different narrative: Individual works read as fragments of large cinematic sequences, swiftly transforming the details of nature into works of culture through the mediation of art.