Unanswered Elemental Thoughts

Swedish artist Nina Canell specially developed 12 installations for a mumok exhibition in 2010. For “Unanswered Elemental Thoughts” the artist chose chewing gum as her material. In preparing the piece Canell sent a number of packets of chewing gun to political activist and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar where she had been under house arrest for 15 years and condemned to silence. The artist asked the activist to associate a thought with each piece of chewing gum. After Aung San Suu Kyi had thought about various – sometimes very abstract – things she sent the chewed gum back to the artist. The quasi ‘time-stretching’ quality of gum matches the boredom induced by the politician’s house arrest. The waiting and the ephemeral nature of time, the artist thought, is incorporated because gum is not chewed to survive but to pass the time. One of the pieces of chewing gum hovers on a magnet above a white base, held in an invisible force field. ‘In the discreet tracing of what remains unspoken, silent or censored’, says the artist, ‘my objects turn to the logic of emanation’. If Canell’s objects are able to reveal invisible trains of thought, the tough material of the chewing gum can be read as a metaphor for the thought process itself. Before taking up the study of art, Canell studied natural science and this influenced her way of thinking and art work. The artist says: ‘At the same time my work refuses to follow any logic. It does not relate to research in the normal sense. Although I like to use scientific knowledge, I very often turn it around and point to a quite different aspect.’