Photographer and artist Elisabeth Ohlson have been given free rein to explore and select works from the Absolut Art Collection for this autumn’s art exhibition The Party is Over, which opened on 10 October 2020.
Foto: Jonas Lindström
Three strong voices from the LGBTQI + community have contributed to the whole; Elisabeth Ohlson as curator, Anna-Maria Sörberg as a writer, and Chrisander Brun as a set designer. Together they take us back to the 80s and 90s in New York, an era that began in a spirit of newfound openness until the AIDS epidemic began to extinguish young people’s lives in the thousands with a rarely seen backlash as a result. Elisabeth remembers how she here in Sweden followed too many close friends from hospital bed to deathbed. Here and there, her fighting spirit and her decision to become an artist were born. Anna-Maria’s historical review and Chrisander’s slightly chaotic party room decor take us back. But we also meet the strength of the LGBTQI + movement’s counter-reaction.
“The struggle is nothing you can buy; you can’t pay for or buy liberation. It has to come at its own pace, from its own strength,” says Elisabeth Ohlson in her writings about the exhibition.
“There is a growing need to focus on the pain, grief, and vulnerability that unite the long history of queer life through its politics, art, and literature,” writes author and journalist Anna-Maria Sörberg in the exhibition’s main written narrative.
Foto: Jonas Lindström
10 OCT–23 MAY, 2021
More about the exhibition HERE
