STOCKHOLM.- The premise of the Loulou Cherinet exhibition is an understanding of the world based on difference, as in stranger/confidante, here/there, modern/historic, sense/sensibility, inside/outside. The description of one draws the outlines of the other. The exhibition features five video works made in 2002-2017, of which one is shown here for the first time.

A central concern in the exhibition is how we create meaning in our existence. Simplifications and generalisations are tools that are crucial to understanding and order. But they also set limits to what is possible and establish conventions and social patterns. The capacity to affect which thought-patterns and language are used gives influence over how people organise, interpret, act and live together.

“Loulou Cherinet’s exhibition is important in a time when the question of what is real is more than ever a topic on the political battlefield. She says she is interested in ‘what it tastes like, looks like, and sounds like, when a nation materialises in our bodies, conversations and behaviours'," says Fredrik Liew, curator of the exhibition.

The title, Who Learns My Lesson Complete? is from a poem by the American poet Walt Whitman’s collection Leaves of Grass, which he reworked in eight different editions up to his death. Loulou Cherinet has said that she feels an affinity with Whitman’s meandering oeuvre and the rarely completed process, where the work of art is basically replaced by the artistic practice.

Five works by Loulou Cherinet are featured in the exhibition:

• White Women (2002), in which eight black men at a staged dinner talk about encounters and relationships with white women. Their discussion is filmed by a rotating camera in the middle of the table.

• Minor Field Study (2006) is based on research footage shot by the anthropologist Billy Marius along the border between Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon. Selected sequences from this documentation are shown alongside clips shot by the artist in Orminge outside Stockholm.

• Big Data (2014) is a growing film archive where Loulou Cherinet documents places and buildings in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which in various ways represent the layers of modernist ruins, historical memorials and contemporary socio-economic change of the urban space.

• Magical Transformations of the World (2009) shows five actresses improvising on ordinary emotional reactions to political scenarios: sorrow, humour, distress, indifference and anger. The imagery of the film is inspired by the trial scene in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent movie classic The Passion of Joan of Arc.

• Statecraft (2017) is based on filmed discussions on “insidership”. In a series of round table discussions, people representing a few of the groups that are labelled as being in “outsidership” in politically-motivated statistics or debates, search for possible definitions and narratives of “insidership”.

Before and Behind the Lens
Loulou Cherinet - Who Learns My Lesson Complete? is part of the photographic project Before and Behind the Lens, which consists of a series of exhibitions, discussions and guided tours. Before and Behind the Lens examines the role of photographic images in art and the transformation of the medium since the early experiments with new technology in the 19th century, to today’s explorations of the potential of the optical lens. Moderna Museet has one of Europe’s finest collections of photography, ranging from pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron to many of the most influential contemporary artists who visualise the world for us with the camera lens.