Barb Macek on Anna Nygren’s “I Hope You Become Fish”

Exhibition: “hoppa tu blir fisk”, Orangeriet in Skebobruk, 17.-25.08.2024
Artist: Anna Nygren

According to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the last words the dolphins say, leaving mankind behind, are: ‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’. More clever then the humans, they foresee the impending end of life on earth and leave in time, thereby ensuring their survival.

Anna Nygren’s fish are also survivors, and they came ashore to tell us about it.

To be able to move on land, to dwell amongst us, they needed clothes – dresses to wear, shoes to walk in. It is with the clothes that one of the stories they tell us begins:

– There once was a teenager, hospitalised and diagnosed with eating disorders, who was not allowed to do much in the constricted clinical environment of the hospital room. One of the things that were allowed was to read fashion magazines – and that’s what they did – immersing themselves in the strange universe of fashion and their representatives. Back home, 13-year-old Anna started to sew clothes –

For the current exhibition, they adapted those dresses for their textile fish and other water creatures, transforming them into unique hybrid beings, mystical and mysterious, distantly related to mermaids, sirens, water ghosts, but primarily a league of their own.

The materials they are made of contrast the qualities fish are usually associated with, like being cold and slick; they give them soft skins and fluffy bodies, wearing fine fabricated clothes of vibrant colours, inviting to be touched and at the same time touching.

The exhibited dresses address femininity, fashion, fear; they display the tension between the wild fish, the free fish in the ocean and the teenager, experiencing social constraints, established by parents, doctors, teachers. The role constraints are expressed by the tightly fitting clothing, covering up and revealing, veiling and disclosing, representing and relating to the difficulties of fitting into this human world.

Under water the dresses would become useless, ballast, dragging their carriers down. They would be constraints, preventing the fish movement, the smooth gliding through the water.

On land the clothes protect the vulnerable skin, the fine scales, the delicate structures of the fish bodies. They protect and establish a connection to the world of fashion as a world of beauty and superficiality.

Fish dive deep, they are even able to reach the ground, the bottom of the ocean. There is the contrast between the deepness of the ocean and the surface of fashion fabrics, covering up what’s vulnerable, hiding what can be found in the dark. The deeper the sea, the darker the water.

Suddenly the world tilts while strolling through the exhibition: What’s usually underneath the surface comes to light, to air – the gills have to breath air now, but the memory of water is everywhere – in the eyes of the fish and in the inaudible, nevertheless omnipresent sound of the waves, bringing in the vastness of the ocean.

There is this question that has been widely discussed in science and literature: Do fish feel pain? Their proverbial coldness together with their, also proverbial, muteness provide the ground from which such a question arises. Both ‘features’ can be retrieved to the human inability to read the bodily, the facial expressions, to interpret the communicative signals of fish.

Anna gives them tongues, textile speech and woollen bodies that allow for interaction, communication, and for touch. They show us new species, unseen by human eyes, that always have existed. They bring us the song of the mute fish, unheard by human ears, yet right here to be detected.

In Anna Nygren’s universe, the singing shark asks if we ‘got it’, the sardines-filled dress dances, the lax relaxes in a deck chair, the shrimps in sneakers jog along the beach – and the cat has not eaten the tongue of the cat fish – in this environment he is talkative, sharing the secret of the muted fish with anyone who is willing to listen.

Anna’s fish are demanding their place in this world, they are ready to be seen, to be perceived and engaged with in dreams and in our social reality.

Escaping from the clinical environment of a hospital into the glamorous world of fashion magazines, of socially consented beauty, Anna started to swim. Instead of wishing to get well – bli frisk – they decided to strive for becoming fish – bli fisk.

Since then they have discovered the beauty that is hidden beneath shiny surfaces, the beauty of the dark ocean and its creatures – and we are thankful to them for showing us what they found!