Chthonic exhibition (meeting in tunnel), review + some suppressed, until now secret words about Ivan Nylander as an introduction
N.H: Sometimes you have experiences that require you to put words to them in order to prevent your emotions from overflowing. For example, when you see Ivan Nylander perform (I will soon share some words that have not been shared before, but they were written out of necessity in 2022), or when you get to experience 31 works of art in a long basement equipped with a flashlight and a cup of wine.
The year was 2022 when I stumbled upon Malmö Art Academy’s annual exhibition, where I leaned against a sort of grid in the kitchen, tired after seeing a lot of art in a short time. As you know, the viewer has a big responsibility as the work first unfolds and comes into being in the encounter between the spectator and the artist, a responsibility that requires presence and openness. In the kitchen, there were various objects, a couple of wooden sculptures by Ruben Risholm and some movable sculptures by Niels Munk Plum, including a pink horse. The horse was moved here and there by visitors, sometimes a little too close to Ruben Risholm’s sculptures, much to Risholm’s frustration. I will now switch to the present tense to emphasize the drama of what I am about to tell. I am about to continue my art journey when Ivan Nylander enters the kitchen. No one else is in the room at this point and he does not see me, but as he passes Plum’s pink horse, he neighs at it, unabashedly, as if it was an inside joke between him and the horse. It was like hearing a tree grow in the forest.
When I went to Nylander’s graduation exhibition a few months later, I had high expectations, and I was not disappointed. He had written text on the walls of the room, mentioning Andy Kaufman and R.E.M. and Man on the Moon, but first and foremost, the text dealt with sound and emotions, described in detail even though it is almost impossible to describe music. Nylander then gave a performance where he sat in front of the audience—there were perhaps five of us sitting on our chairs— and he sang a piece, Bach’s Fifth Suite, while miming playing the cello. He had memorized the entire piece, which took half an hour, with precise vocal sounds and credible miming. Afterwards, he smiled slyly, as if it were all an almost malicious joke, conveying the beauty of being interested in an art form for which there is theoretically no market (but then there is, otherwise I wouldn’t have had to write about it). In reality, if I remember what is true, he couldn’t play the cello, but he had practiced the movements. He immersed himself in every note, including the sad ones, and by the end you could see the sweat through his shirt. The only thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was that my journalist colleague Per sat next to me almost falling asleep on his chair during what was, for me, a great artistic experience. Fortunately, he was in better shape on Saturday, October 18, 2025.
We did not know what to expect when we were invited to what was said to be an underground exhibition, literally speaking, a one day show in the basement of Malmö’s Malmgården. The rumor has it that Malmgården has—or had—many artworks, some which is still hidden in one of the many corridors that moves under the building. But this exhibition was not about old works of art, it was about relatively new works, curated by Young Promising Hive Mind, a strange name for what they claim to be an artist collective.
As we enter the basement, after seeing a poster on the front door printed on a A4 paper, we almost fall down the stairs lit up by candles in bottles. We are at a a fork in the river which is a tunnel, and we choose to go right, towards a romantic candlestick. There we meet a guy who hands us a flashlight, a text-sheet and luckily, some free white wine. We are confronted with the title of the exhibition and a drawing which gives associations to the underworld and the unconscious, with a text that ends with “Experts disagree on wether it is funny or not. (Open for discussion)”. The walk into the unknown begins and so does the childish thrill of using a flashlight which, if you ask us, highlights the direction of the gaze, its desire, and the mystery and humor of searching.