Liv Melin

This character could kill the show
Hi (scarf and silk gloves)
I’m Monopoly
I am ‘well’ put together

‘ONE performs annually the tragicomedy of the separation: the more people are isolated, the more they resemble each other, the more they resemble each other, the more they hate each other, the more they hate each other, the more they isolate themselves. And there, where men can no longer recognise one another as participating in the edification of a common world, it is a chain reaction, a collective fission that everyone continues to catalyse.’ (Tiqqun, “The Theory of Bloom”, 2000)

1: Psychological conditioning: The result, in the inner life, of what external matters has taught us about reality.
2: Social conditions: The external conditions that are in the shape of human relations, i.e. expectations, upbringing, quality and quantity of relationships, etc.
3: Material conditions: Means, money, class, geographic position, surrounding politics.
4: Interpersonal conflict: I think ‘this’ and they think ‘that’. It’s a crash. I feel ‘this’ they feel ‘that’. It’s a crash. The crash leaves the parties, one or both, without a clear path forward. And what is a path?
5: Inner conflict: I think and feel ‘this’ but also ‘that’. It’s a crash, I am left confused and without access to a clear path forward.
6: Renovation: Make it new! Care for it. Out with the old. Change appeal and apparel. Also, erasure of visual history. Take something that you like, but just enough, or barely enough, and make it into something that you love. Erase the touch of others. Take control of how it looks, make the material an extension of the self.

Extension of the self. At that point, where does it end? How much power can someone ask for?

Liv Melin (b. 1995) works with installation and sculpture with a thematic focus on the intersection between the subject and its surroundings, and the question of who we are, who we believe ourselves to be, and who we claim to be within the larger collective.

Installation shots from the exhibition “Hi (Scarf and Silk Gloves)” on renovation and self-presentation.