Anders Kreuger: Immersed in Language 37

The Swede Anders Kreuger is a curator, writer & educator. He has been the director of the renowned Kohta Gallery in Helsinki since 2019. Prior to that, he was the senior curator at HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the director of the Malmö Art Academy, & was a member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. He was a founding member of the Nordic Council of Minsters Information Office in Vilnius, served as the director of the Nordic Arts Center in Helsinki & has served on the editorial board of the London-based art journal Afterall as well as the Ghent journal A Prior.

 

He has also worked as an independent curator, organizing numerous exhibitions throughout Europe.  He has taught at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Royal College of Art in London, & other European art academies. Served as an advisor to the Raqs Media Collective at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano. Anders Kreuger regularly writes essays for catalogues & journals, & has edited numerous publications.

He has been deeply & personally immersed in words, reading, & language since his childhood experiences immersed in reading children’s books. As a curator he thrives on how words affect his work as a curator & loves working with, for & through people as his way of constructing a situation that allows the viewer to become immersed in an exhibition.  

I met Anders in Helsinki through Martti Aiha, the acclaimed Finnish artist known as Mara, a long time friend of my wife, librettist Maija-Leena Rems. Mara, sadly recently deceased, was on the founding board of Kohta Gallery. Anders & I had many conversations about shamanism & the influence of the oldest ideas on the contemporary world. Growing from this shared interest, Anders created the gallery show, Charlie Morrow, A Gathering which included Winter Solstice Celebration with musicians around the world. Currently, he is curating the Yes & No Tation gallery show which is paired with Sound Circus, a public event. 

Subjects discussed: Telepathy, AI, immersion, written language, thought before language, reading minds, inducing immersive states, seeing images in objects, shamans, origin & development of language, Chomsky, galleries, curation, museums, cave paintings, dream singing, desire to connect, Stalin, Finland, comparative linguistics, arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, Cratylus, Andaman Islands, Navajo, Elias Canetti, Fascism, Trumpianism, color theory, Kandinski, & so much more…