Annika Eriksson

I Am the Dog That Was Always Here (Loop)

Video loop, 7’, 2013

The video work I Am the Dog That Was Always Here (Loop), set on the outskirts of Istanbul, focuses on moments of transition and marginalised experiences of time as seen through the lens of a street dog. Having been moved by the authorities to peripheral pockets and no man’s lands outside the expanding city, the dogs are continuously moving along lines of gentrification and corporate city making. Through looping and repetition, Eriksson relates this process to an experience of time: exploring the present as a complex gap between past and future, one in which an increasing process of erasure, spurred on by a shrinking public realm, also removes other registers of being and seeing. The work was originally commissioned for the 13th Istanbul Biennial in 2013.

Artist's bio

One of Sweden’s most internationally acclaimed artists, Annika Erisson (b. 1956, Malmö, Sweden) currently lives and works in Berlin. She was a pioneer of the artistic tendency to place real situations and social interactions at the centre of project-oriented and performative art, a tendency which became more and more prominent in the 1990s. Besides the documentation of real occurrences, Eriksson employs for her film projects more and more the means of staging and narration. She thereby often thematises public, urban space as a setting for social processes and upheavals which reflect the conventions as well as the differences and conflicts within social interaction and in the idea of the collective.