Tremulations

In the book About tremors From 1718, Emmanuel Swedenborg describes the world as consisting of “tremulations.” Everything shakes and trembles. We humans vibrate like strings with our bloodstream, our thoughts and our voices. Even large things like buildings and celestial bodies tremble. Often the tremors are so slow that we don’t notice them. 

The exhibition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm is a vibrating phantom. The Academy's library dreams of another place: Swedenborg House in London, where an earlier version of the exhibition was shown. There, objects and documents from the archives of the Swedenborg Society coexisted with artworks and films by artists such as Tony Cokes, Mark Leckey and Meret Oppenheim. That exhibition now haunts the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts library through a kind of dream images and visual echoes that flicker past.

Tremulations also has an acoustic dimension. Swedenborgian-inspired voices from world literature are whispered in the semi-darkness. His influence on literature was global. Spanish, Japanese, Polish, German, English and French are spoken here, among other languages. The selection of literary fragments has been made in collaboration with Anna-Karin Palm and Anders Olsson, both members of the Swedish Academy.

The exhibition is co-produced by the Swedish Academy and the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts.

Thanks to The Swedenborg Society, London and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, Göran Lagervall's foundation.