Lecture by Jonas Dahlberg

Thursday, February 26, 2015, 6:30 - 8:30pm

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Video still, Weightless Space, courtesy Jonas Dahlberg

Video still, Weightless Space, courtesy Jonas Dahlberg

Presented as part of the 2015 Student Lecture Series

Jonas Dahlberg lives and works in Stockholm. He studied architecture at Lunds Technical High School, and received his M.F.A. from the Malmö Art Academy in 2000. Since then he has worked on developing a series of videos that primarily consist of slow movements through architectural spaces. The videos are created by building miniaturised architectural sets that are filmed through experimental methods.

In addition to video and video installation, his practice includes public art works, sculptures, commissions, book projects and photography. In June 2012, Dahlberg's concept and set design for an opera production of Guiseppe Verdi's Macbeth debuted at the Grand Theatre in Geneva.

In February 2014 Dahlberg was announced the winner in the closed competition for the 22 July Memorial at Sørbråten and in Oslo, Norway. The concept for the Memorial Sørbråten proposes a wound or a cut within nature itself. It reproduces the physical experience of taking away, reflecting the abrupt and permanent loss of those who died. The cut will be a three-and-a-half-meters-wide excavation. It slices from the top of the headland at the Sørbråten site, to below the water line and extends to each side. This void in the landscape makes it impossible to reach the end of the headland.

Through his installations, be they video or otherwise, Jonas Dahlberg works with space. Architecture is addressed as a political place that influences how we understand ourselves, and how the body and mind experience the outside world.

Located in RM 315 of The Foundation Building

Open only to current student/faculty/staff of The Cooper Union

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.