The work "Fuck It Up and Start Again" consists of a video lasting a mere seven minutes. It tells the tragic story of an acoustic guitar. In it, the artist Sofia Hultén destroys a guitar, until it bursts into many small pieces. Then she rebuilds it and the game begins all over again. She repeats the cycle of destruction and reconstruction seven times, and a photograph documents the end of the process, the battered guitar full of cracks and wounds. In its form it is still clearly recognisable but it has lost its original usefulness for ever. The brief comment is that destroying the guitar became easier each time. In another work Sofia Hultén collected a range of broken objects from the street, for example a balloon or the shards of a glass bottle. She took them home and mended the. the balloon was given a bicycle patch on its holes and blown up again. The pieces of glass were reassembled into a bottle and stuck together with tape. Then she took the objects back to the place where she found them and photographed them. She then abandoned them to their fate again. The work consists of the results, i.e. a series of photos. these are the last signs of life of the objects.
      In a way anyone can understand her: Sofia Hultén sets herself tasks which can easily be followed in their simplicity. She presents her actions or the results in brief, precise form. But in fact what she does is devoid of any purpose and leads to a sort of ecstatic pointlessness. Why destroy a guitar only to rebuild it? Why repair objects only to leave them to be destroyed again? One must see Sofia Hultén's work as parables. From a certain point the plot takes seond place and the metaphoric level becomes the core of the whole thing again. Initially she experimented on the objects to test their resilience to strain. Also, the work is all about destruction, (re)creation, disappearance, materialisation and dematerialisation. She addresses the principle of nature because she treats the objects like living creatures and creates a life cycle for them. Behind this is the question of how we treat objects, and how fixing our attention on their semantic level leads to indifference.
       In another work, Sofia Hultén goes the opposite way, she takes her kitchen drawer in which all sorts of things have gathered and takes them to a scientific institute to be analysed in order to be given a profile of her behaviour and character. In this case it is the objects which are made to speak. But what is more interesting than the result of the analysis is the fact that such analyses even exist. No matter how we look at Sofia Hultén's work, it always gives us cause to think about things which are seemingly unimportant. P.S.: In the Middle Ages the average person used to possess about 300 objects, today they own more than ten thousand.


(From a radio report by Hessischer Rundfunk 2002)

Natalie de Ligt 2004

From the catalogue to the exhibition Fellbach Triennale der Kleinplastik