BIOGRAPHY
Goldin+Senneby was created in 2004 by Simon Goldin & Jakob Senneby. Based in Stockolm
2008 Data Recovery, Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Italy;
Terms of Use, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain;
Looks Conceptual, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo
2007 Twentyfourseven, Signal, Malmö, Sweden
2005 Gate Page, Artport, Whitney Museum of American Art (online), USA;
Game Dump, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway
Selected Bibliography DURMUSOGLU, Övül,
Data Recovery (cat.), Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, 2008; EINARSSON, Kim, ”Nameless Acting”,
Geist, no. 11, 12, 14, 2007-2008, pp. 105-117; PAUL, Christiane,
Digital Art, London, Thames & Hudson, 2008.
INTERVIEW
Joshua Decter: On your website we read that “G+S is a framework for collaboration set up by artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby; exploring juridical, financial and spatial constructs through notions of the performative and the virtual.” So, do you seek to virtualize yourselves in strategic ways in order to reproduce, for potentially critical purposes, the ways in which such hegemonic constructs appear to function in the world of corporeal and informational flows?
Goldin+Senneby: Yes.
Joshua Decter: I wonder if you might share with the readers your pursuit of Headless entities – at once tangible and virtual?
Goldin+Senneby: “In the forthcoming novel
Looking for Headless, the fictional author K.D. tells the story of two artists – Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby – who initiate a collaboration with author John Barlow: Goldin and Senneby investigate an offshore company on the Bahamas called Headless Ltd., and Barlow writes a docu-fictional murder-mystery, also called
Headless, based on these investigations. The three protagonists increasingly become entangled in the world of offshore business, while speculating about the possible connections between Headless Ltd. and the secret society known as Acéphale (from the Greek
a-cephalus, meaning “headless”) founded by Georges Bataille in the late 1930s.
“Goldin+Senneby’s investigation takes the shape of an ongoing performance where subject, method and artistic narrative cannot be separated. Their work is carried out through entering the world of offshore business and appropriating its methods, language and strategies, while continuously displacing their own subject position.” –
Lisa Rosendahl (curator)
Joshua Decter: Since you apparently utilized a spokesperson for yourselves recently, there is a lingering question as to whether I am communicating with Goldin+Senneby – or if that actually matters? Perhaps the origin, or authorial node, doesn’t matter as much as the multiple meanings constructed within a flow of social relations…
Goldin+Senneby: “…an anonymous Spokesperson shows up and claims to be [Goldin+Senneby’s] representative and it is he who gives the details about
Headless. A comedy of errors unfolds where one signification always slides into the next, suspending the moment where something could be revealed ‘as it is.’ It reminds the reader of a mask drama where the mask is a face worn by many, and where the identity between mask and character may break at any moment, when it turns out that another character is wearing the same mask. The sliding between signification and sign on a visible, readable surface continuously carries references to invisible, unarticulated meanings with it.” –
gou in Geist,
Method issue, 2007–2008
Joshua Decter: Since you are probing “strategies of withdrawal and secrecy” as these conditions pertain to offshore companies, do you understand your practice to be a form of institutional critique in relation to systems of globalized capital? Or, perhaps, a form of web-based, conceptually grounded cultural activism?
Goldin+Senneby: “‘Tell me about Goldin and Senneby,’ she says, watching as John Barlow, the author, continues to look at the child. ‘Simon and Jakob.’
‘This is a joke, right?’
She ignores him.
‘Their work. Do you understand it?’ she asks.
He looks at her.
‘My job is to…’
‘Notions of withdrawal and invisibility…’ She stares right at him as she recites from memory.
‘Art-historical tactics of surrealist sociologist Georges Bataille come together with present-day capitalist strategies of offshore incorporations.’
She finishes. He decides to say nothing. She indulges him. But she does not allow him to avert his stare, which she fixes with her own eyes until he is embarrassed by the forced intimacy of it.
‘You work with these people?’ she says, still looking straight into his cringing eyes. ‘These art-historical guys?’
‘Yes, I’m writing a novel with them.
Headless.’”
* Excerpt from
Looking for Headless by fictional author K.D.
Joshua Decter is a curator, critic, and art historian. He is the director of the Public Art Studies graduate program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and he is based in Los Angeles and New York.
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