Saturday, 26 September
14.00–16.00

Meet the artists Alberta Whittle and Felix Gmelin.

Their presentations depart from their respective works on display at Skånes konstförening and expand outwards into their wider artistic practices.

Alberta Whittle’s What Sound Does The Black Atlantic Make? (2019) unravels the colonial legacy of the North British Rubber Company, turning towards the ocean as a site of memory. At the heart of Felix Gmelin’s Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II (2002) is the question: Can a political gesture be inherited? Gmelin uses reenactment to examine former political movements, particularly traces of 1960s radicalism.

The exhibition Tremble, curated by Tawanda Appiah, presents works by Alberta Whittle, Felix Gmelin, and Frida Orupabo. In this world of unrest and friction, it asks how resistance takes form, moves, and persists over time. Embracing Édouard Glissant’s approach to tremblement it accepts the ongoing rumbling as a matter of fact, and presses on what it means to live, think, and act within it.

You can read more about the exhibition here.

About the artists

ALBERTA WHITTLE (b. 1980, Bridgetown, Barbados) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, received her PhD from Edinburgh College of Art in 2024 and is a current Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. Alberta represented Scotland at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and has been a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Artists, Turner Bursary, Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award. Alberta was the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/19.

Whittle’s multifaceted practice is preoccupied with developing a personal response to the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, unpicking its connections to institutional racism, white supremacy and climate emergency in the present. Against an oppressive political background Alberta aims to foreground hope and engage with different forms of resistance.

FELIX GMELN (b. 1962, Heidelberg), received his BA and MFA in painting from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. He is based in Trondheim, where he is a Professor of Painting and Beyond at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. Since 1992 Gmelin has taught at a broad range of international art schools, including Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Staatliche Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, International Academy of Art Palestine, Ramallah and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

What does it mean to teach anyone anything? For Gmelin this question is both the subject and the topos—the conceptual space—in which his work operates. In a twofold sense, many of his pieces are exercises in pedagogy: they foreground the act itself without necessarily endorsing its ideological intent, testing the limits of materialisation, and, when the test fails, exposing the act to mockery that can reveal unexpected meanings.

Images:
Felix Gmelin by Christian Tviberg.
Alberta Whitlle by Matthew A Williams.