The Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation awards an annual grant for the support of young visual artists and artistic work. The Foundation was founded in 1985 by Jeanette Bonnier in memory of her daughter Maria. Since its inception, the Foundation has awarded 57 artists, which gives a sense of the role the Foundation has played in the Swedish art world.
The Grant Committee’s statement of 2007, written by artist Dan Wolgers:
Johannes Heldén
Johannes Heldén forces the alphabet to do the splits. One leg in front and the other behind. Science fiction is doing the splits, as well as interactivity and an open book – everything that’s important to Heldén is doing the splits. Everything is forced to do the splits – including the viewer. To create or to break down, to look or to touch, to listen or to read. Is it even possible to read anything? Is it even possible to read? Should one intervene or resist, do everything or nothing? Hands on or off? To remain indifferent to these questions only results in the fact that one bursts one’s pants in the end, and that’s not cool, anyway. Dressed up in his commodious vocabulary and with super-supple art joints, Heldén does somersaults in splits with all his twenty-nine companions.
Caroline Mårtensson
One of Caroline Mårtensson’s settings reveals that the classical polar bearskin on the floor of the cosy corner has been replaced, surreptitiously, with a dog skin. It’s a Golden Retriever, a skinned golden reporter (as Mårtensson herself, or any other artist, come to think of it). The cosy corner may be a corner in the castle on the Scottish island of Eilean Donan with its single inhabitant (the artist is the single inhabitant of her studio). The name of the island castle is Eilean Donan Castle which is also the title of a couple of minute shooting towers made by Mårtensson, in perfect animal size for the revengeful animals around the castle.
In another sculpture group, comprising stuffed birds on their perches, the carcases have, in fact, finally run away from it all - the birds, the prey, which the dog skin once so obediently fetched. Returned to nature after having stood at attention, in dead silence, in culture, completely solo, they now warble away in the Elysian fields. What remain of death and the artwork are only the naked, dead black perches, on the walls, as a gloomy musical score. The bird dog slain, her retrieved birds flown away in a cloud of sawdust. However, in another group, the otherwise naked creatures of the earth stand dressed in uniform - obscene, close-fitting body stockings; cuddly toys with claws, better camouflaged in culture than in nature, ready, as Mårtensson.
Martin Sundvall
With the help of his computer, Martin Sundvall has, among other things, produced some kind of mathematical diagram that shows how trees branch off, so that the viewer kind of bounces about among the branches and limbs – and stares. Sundvall’s work itself may be seen as such a ramification; one branch is an outgrowth of another and what recently was just a branch is now a sturdy limb with new branches and offshoots that push the artist forward and upward. Sundvall also grafts various disciplines and expressions on both the trunk and the limbs, to ensure that some part of the tree is continuously blooming and bearing fruit. Fruits of various forms, colours and flavours on the same trunk tinge the tree, surprising the gaping viewer. Another puzzling computer animation expounds, from a bird’s-eye-view, the swimming patterns of some ducks on Stockholms Ström. A swan (an X), reportedly rather irascible, and a piece of bread (a cross) are the fixed points around which the swans (noughts) paddle away in meandering patterns – a game of noughts and crosses with fluid rules. One can imagine that Martin Sundvall himself is sometimes located on the water. A so-called artistic ornamentation, a sculpture, shows Sundvall standing at the helm in the rain in full sea attire, but without the boat, without the helm and even without the rain, far away up on dry land in Linköping. You see him at a distance already when you stand next to him, that is, he reaches only halfway up to your knees where he stands. The plaque of the monument (because you become monumental standing next to it) provides information about the title, which is Martin Sundvall b. 1975. That’s the numerator, and then below, of course, the same letters and figures reappear, as the denominator. He himself as the fractional number, dividing himself with himself and it always breaks even.