Metápolis – Sculpture Installation
30.8 – 12.10 1986
The city as betrayal and promise, form and utopia.
The city as betrayal and promise, form and utopia.
With Metápolis, a powerful and provocative statement took shape – an artistic response to the housing exhibition Bo86 and the growing discourse around the future of the city. Malmö was in a moment of transformation, and seven artists were invited to Malmö Konsthall to interpret the city as idea, body, and conflict.
Dick Bengtsson’s installation “Möbelräls” (“Furniture Rail”) evokes a journey through history. A real railway track – complete with rails, sleepers, and gravel – is flanked by old furniture, like shadows of lives once lived. A silent reflection on movement, memory, and displacement.
In Hand, Lars Kleen constructs a monumental wooden sculpture – a tribute to Vladimir Tatlin, one of the great Russian Constructivists, and to a time when art dared to build the future.
Sivert Lindblom’s “Ironic Monument” consists of sixteen small, identical clay figures placed on tall, white pedestals. Each one is based on a self-portrait sculpture by the artist, repeated with near-scientific precision – a satirical take on ideals, glorification, and art’s self-image.
Lars Englund’s “Annex 1986” offers a space where opposites meet: a tent-like structure of metal poles and mesh, where static architecture coexists with a sense of change – a built environment in the making.
Together, the participating artists – Dick Bengtsson, Lars Englund, Eberhard Höll, Lars Kleen, Sivert Lindblom, Joakim Pirinen, and Christer Strömholm – created a city in the form of sculpture. Metápolis was not a city to live in, but to think with: a speculative topography of contemporary dreams, memories, and contradictions.
