Blown Away
David Permén
November 5, 2026 - January 2027
Max was acquainted with David through mutual friends and was asked to help out during the install of David’s solo graduation exhibition Heaven Can Wait at Galleri Mejan in January 2026. It wasn’t the first time the two had collaborated. A common impulse for an artist when faced with a solo show is to fill the room with lots of things, hoping to show off their ability to produce a multitude and mass of artworks. Katarina joined for the opening and we both agreed that David had successfully resisted this impulse and instead created an exhibition that was an artwork in itself.
During a trip to Peru a few years ago, David saw army personnel in white jackets and trousers, peaked caps and shiny black shoes. Intrigued by them, he started the complicated and law-bending process of purchasing such an outfit and bringing it back to Sweden. We pondered the idea to put the suits in the show or to wear them during the opening in a performative manner but in the end figured the triangulation of the metal objects, the magazines and the suits would give the impression of a imposing an elaborate narrative about a plane crash. However, during install, we’ve taken photos of David wearing a white suit surrounded by his sculptures, pictures that remain as present in their absence to us as what ended up on display. What is left from this de-selection process is two framed magazines and 16 metal sculptures hung according to the contradictory logic of a ”controlled explosion”.
David recalled that a group of tourists had accidentally stepped into his degree show on their way to Moderna Museet, only to swiftly walk out again because from their point of view ”There’s nothing in here”. Some feel the force field, some don’t.
The blue, red and yellow of the TIME and Newsweek magazine covers repeat the primary colors in the pattern-maze of the ornamental border in David’s degree show. The white suits that were very present during the process of making Blown Away are eerily similar to the white suit that David wears during his shifts at Operabaren. We first discarded the two pieces of metal coated in green and off-white paint for a consistently metallic show, but later brought back into the mix they seemed to contribute to a military, or pan-American, aura to the show that we did not predict. What came first, the hen or the egg? Are these artistic decisions conscious or subconscious? Is synchronicity a side affect of chance encounters or manifestations of the existence of destiny? Are our own ”free” associations simply automatic responses to having watched too much American television in the 90s? Is there such a thing as free will? The question is absurd. Of course not. Antics believes in the power of images.
If we are very fond of a de-materialized art object as indexed by Lucy Lippard in the late 60s, we are equally fond of a materialized idea. For a gallerist to state that their show consists of ”art objects” is perhaps banal to the point of funny, but we’re serious. It’s very hard to make art that is actually interesting to perceive without a life-supporting exhibition text, that have the ability to come off as simultaneously self-evident and obscure, familiar and strange, that are sites where the formal jams with the philosophical and the personal. Conceptual Art with a human soul.
Katarina pictures David in his white suit exiting a white jet at the airport, in the music video for hit single Blown Away on MTV in 1996. Cut to: A wife in grief at the Ramada Plaza JFK Hotel aka The Heartbreak Hotel scans headlines for contradictions to the fact that ”They searched for survivors but found none” and suddenly hears a knock on the door. Enter David, an angel descended to planet earth, whispering in her ear; ”Heaven Can Wait”. Wind machine, red roses, a guitar solo through a vaseline-smeared lens. Max pictures the exhibition a UFO crash site and David an FBI agent flown into Area 51. The witnesses’ testimonies were littered with discrepancies but a common denominator was the account of a ”streak of light” hitting Flight 800 before the explosion. From the FBI vaults:
”X did not see where the false originated from, but thought that it was as close as the bay. The flare continued ascending for about three seconds… The flare was red-orange in color with white in the middle, elongated in shape like a baseball bat…The light seemed to be moving away from X, as if further south. As the flare ascended, it suddenly turned deeper orange, and got larger, but not exactly round in shape… Slowly the entire body of fire descended and became more misinformed in shape. X described the shape as being like a ”pulled tooth”. X expected the fire to descend into the bay, but lost sight of it as it descended much farther south beyond Dune Road. There was a smoke trail following the fire mass as it descended downward.”
A UFO or an art experience? Try reading C.G. Jung’s Flying Saucers but exchange ”UFO” for ”art object” and it still holds up remarkably well.
There are different types viewers. One type enjoys the void between what is known and what is unknown and to surf this space of uncertainty is their Nirvana. Another type enjoys when things fall into place in front of them, a roller-coaster ride of connecting dots and small and large epiphanies. The first type might pick up the exhibition text on their way out from the art space, the second picks it up first thing. Some will roll it up and hold it in their hand as an anchor throughout the evening without ever reading it. A common impulse for visitors of art exhibitions is to read the art like a rebus and to struggle to find the solution to the problem that the artist has supposedly posed. Other forms of art have the ability to dodge this dilemma. Prose tends to consist of text yet does not always prescribe you the correct way for your thoughts to behave around it. There’s space in between the lines no matter their density. David’s phantastical artistic practice brings to mind works of magical realism like Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita or William S. Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, references never brought up by the artist himself but simply applied to the art by tourists like us.
David just smiles and neither confirms nor debunks his gallerists’ spontaneous associations. It’s generous to be open-minded as an artist. Every show that we do at Antics is an experiment in perception and social interaction and we are thrilled to know the visitors’ reactions to what’s on display.