EMMA KIHL

1976 Stockholm. Lives in Stockholm

Dying Words. Sound, print, text, embossing 2007

Emma Kihl is an artist who is compiling the bookshelf of works ending only with the death of the hero, interviewing retired Swedish generals on security issues, exploring a government project that is trying to map the quietest areas of Sweden. Her works always include a strong semiotic aspect of lacking, of inability to speak or to hear, originating from the daily life of our society. In Dying Words, the artist concentrates on these lackings, the holes in daily and artistic texts, makes them visible and gives them a voice. Emma Kihl describes the apparatus for recording the last words of dying persons, the project of identifying the most silent areas of Sweden, a play by Harold Pinter, of which only the pauses have been kept, and finally, the potential notes of a Swedish spy. Each separate part of the work is accompanied by a text encoded with the same pauses and blanks, of which the story is all about.







Photos: Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo 2007 © Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia