Opening night Mining Life

Mining Life, Oscar Lara
Opening Friday 6.10 2023, 5-8PM

Welcome to Oscar Lara’s most comprehensive exhibition in Sweden to date, a rich and visual mix of scenography built on personal memories echoing stories from within the jungle, as well as winding sheet from pre-historic tombs that blow in as ghosts from the past.

5PM
Doors open. Yalla Rinkeby will serve food and sweets during the evening in the café.
6PM
Cecilia Widenheim, director welcomes the guestsThe artist Oscar Lara and the curator Lisa Rosendahl give an introduction to the exhibition.

A theatrical cityscape, a group of street comedians and a number of culturally explosive textiles are at center stage in Mining Life by the artist Oscar Lara (Stockholm/Lima). Through four extensive project which the artist has worked with for a long time, memories and stories connected to migration and mining emerge: from illegal trade with valuable cultural heritage that happened in the 1930s between Peru and and Sweden, to individual destinies from the micro-societies that have developed around the illegal gold mining industry in the Amazon in the last fifteen years.

Oscar Lara (Peru, 1977) is an artist based in Stockholm and Lima. He holds a Master of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong, Australia and is currently a PhD candidate at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. His work researches social practices for substantial structural change and recontextualization of ethnographic material for the activation of decolonial power. Lara has exhibited at MALI – Museo de Arte de Lima (2017), Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Madrid, 2012), Tetem Kunstruimte (Enschede, Netherlands, 2011), Museum of World Culture (Gothenburg, 2008), GIBCA, Gthenburg (2021). He was also one of the participating artists at the Autostrada biennale in Kosovo in 2023.

Image: Still from Searching for Power on the Collective Laugh, 2017–23

The projects presented in Mining Life would not have been possible to achieve without the superb teams and contributors that Oscar Lara has collaborated with, an enormous support from the Embassy of Peru, the Swedish Arts Council and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and an invaluable collaboration with our colleagues at Ställbergs Gruva / The Non Existent Centre. Many thanks!

The exhibition runs until 28.1 2024