Collection: Wonderland

WONDERLAND

Akay & Olabo have a history of setting up illicit installations and various
other creative vandalisms in public places. Their recent collaboration has
taken them out of those traditional urban spaces and into off-limit areas; condemned
warehouses, empty office buildings, decommissioned timber yards, and the
like.

They’ve gained access and had keys made to half a dozen abandoned properties
around Stockholm. They’ve gone into places where teargas still lingers from
police practice drills, where water leaks have transformed rooms into blue-green
mold marshes, or where they find a perfectly preserved office environment from the
eighties. Most of the time, they end up finding themselves inside an undramatic
industrial building where it simply looks like everyone left one day and forgot
to lock the door.
For the past few years, they’ve been able to practice their finders keepers
philosophy and combine their shared interests in long bike rides and unlawful
entry in order to produce very particular works which often go unseen by anyone
other than the copper thieves, squatters or demolition men who also frequent
these places. The work exists as documentation, but the artistry lies in the
process. Akay & Olabo have made a sport out of scavenging and a lifestyle out
of trespassing.

WONDERLAND is a playful attempt to recreate the experience Akay & Olabo
have when they make their way inside a new place, to enjoy the delights of
getting in and challenges of remaining undetected. All the materials used to
build the pieces in this museum have been relocated from derelict industrial
buildings, repurposed from discarded construction materials, or recycled from
city dumps. Many of the pieces draw attention to the aesthetics of surveillance
objects and the elegance of locking mechanisms, all of them encourage exploration
of a space.

RAE

http://www.mimamuseum.eu/wonderland/