>back to "Battle of Sugar" Johan Svensson in the Project Room Johan Svensson lives in Malmö and graduated from the Art Academy here in 2000. Since then, he has shown a series of exhibitions in Scandinavia and was awarded a three month studio grant at Suomenlinna in Finland. His show at the Rooseum continues the policy of encouraging artists to produce new, ambitious work for our project room. Johan Svensson works with sculptures, drawings and objects to tell narratives that are often allegorical or surrealist. His work can reference famous and infamous personalities, places, signs and events taken from history and contemporary debates. In his presentations the subjects are liberated from their original situation to create a world where new combinations emerge. In the Rooseum Project Room, an enormous sugar landscape is scattered over the floor, covered with a swarm of nasty, deformed insects. Nailed to their hard little bodies are well known trademarks: McDonalds, VW, Marlboro, Nike, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, Shell, etc. The work becomes a creepy, slightly sickening vision of a version of our consumer paradise, parodied by an overabundance of sweetness. The inhuman strategies and ruthless marketing of the trademark companies can be seen as the dark side of our welfare state, something we come across every day of our lives. Recently a growing resistance to consumerism is making itself heard. For example, the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein talks about the fact that it is the trademark rather than the product that consumers pay for, a fact that would be a nightmare for these companies and marketing industry if it were seriously understood. The understanding that peoples first role in society is as citizens rather than consumers is perhaps less evident now than ever, yet the intention of Svensson´s work is less to point this out than to ask us to think about the consequences of handing power over to the global brands so easily. Åsa Nacking Curator, Rooseum, Malmö