Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. Patti Smith
Artist, performer and poet Patti Smith was present at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern to inaugurate her own photo exhibition called Eighteen Stations. With striking kindness Smith strolled around her exhibition, saying hi to the public and signing books before giving the opening speech and welcoming the crowds who had gathered to see her. Galleri 3, where the exhibition is held was totally full. There’s enough people here to have a rock n’ roll show!, were the words of an amused Patti Smith.
Watch our video of Patti Smith signing books and giving her opening speech…
Using a Land 250 Polaroid camera, a model originally manufactured in the late 1960s with a Zeiss Ikon designed rangefinder, she produces her polaroid images that revolve around her book M Train (2015). A book that starts in a little café in Greenwich Village, where she likes to go to have black coffee and write her thoughts in a notebook. She takes you through her everyday life in New York and to her past. So do her photographs in Eighteen Stations, they talk about memories and about dreamscapes. They’re also an elegy for the departed. Her images go deep into artistic creation, the artist’s self-recognition and the passage of time. Smith‘s photographs act not only as illustrations on the pages of her book, but also form a message that she wants to transmit in which art and literature have the power to bring hope and consolation.
Crosses, beds, landscapes, tools, statues, faces, tombstones and belongings of artists that helped shape our culture are just a few of the subjects appearing within the polaroids’ frames. The original polaroids have been reproduced as gelatin silver prints for this exhibition.
After visiting the exhibition one can opt to stop by and visit “Patti Smith’s library“, where Kulturhuset has gathered some of the books selected by Smith that had marked and inspired her work in some way or other. These books can be read and borrowed by the interested visitors at the library.
The exhibition will be open until February 19th 2017.
