Belly of the Beast
2021-22
Gothenburg Art Museum

For a number of years, Emanuel Röhss’ work has examined the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic 1920s buildings in Los Angeles. Their form heavily stylized in what is often referred to as Mayan Revival the houses possess temple-like yet claustrophobic properties. Since the 1930s they were frequently utilized as locations or design references in a large number of movie and TV productions, e.g. Blade Runner (1982) and Westworld (2016-2021). Röhss has recurringly explored how these films, television series and buildings exercise a reciprocal influence on each other. What psychological affect is generated in the encounters between fiction, place, and its history? 

Taking a site-specific approach Röhss’ work will often juxtapose local architecture and fictive environments. Also true in this exhibition wherein its central work – the essay film Monster Dialectics – is enveloped by the scenographic installation Belly of the Beast. These two works aim to unpack Hollywood’s extensive utilization of Wright’s L.A. buildings, not only as film sets, but also as dramatic devices. The architectural arcade dressed in ornamentation is a reference to Minneshallen. A monumental yet temporary building, realized as part of the Jubilee Exhibition in Gothenburg 1923, wherein it in a sense acted as a stage set that was subsequently demolished. 

The exhibition’s second part deals with the ideas of time and transience. The recorded seismic activity in California’s recent history serve as point of departure in a sound and light piece titled Earth Song. The work aims to make a fragment of geological time somewhat tangible and serve as a reminder of Earth’s constant mutability. In the process of making this piece Röhss translated the given earthquake events into audible sound and perceivable light, in an attempt to address the passing of time and perpetual decline in nature.