Ilja Karilampi presented by NSFW
StarTrak

October 26, 2022 – December 7, 2022

Entrance hosts NSFW gallery from Gothenburg, Sweden, presenting works by Ilja Karilampi.

Karilampi presents several new works: the video “Norwegian Roadmovie 2”, a hike on foot from Sweden over the border to Norway, and a printed series of deconstructed “Milady Auras”, created from the leaked assets of a derivative NFT project with the same name.

Ilja Karilampi (b. 1983, Gothenburg, Sweden) is an artist based in Berlin, educated at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Karilampi works with an ongoing aesthetic development related to musical energy and visual narrative, building a conceptual world of glamorous social realism. Through materials such as colored vinyl, engraved aluminum, videos, and large scale sculptural gestures, Karilampi attempts to manifest our ever-streaming iconography into one coherent visual ecosystem.

He has exhibited at MoMA PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Sandy Brown and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, hFACTOR in Lagos, Revolver Galería in Lima, and Temnikova & Kasela Gallery in Tallinn.

Special thanks to the Consulate General of Sweden.

“Norwegian Roadmovie 2” (11:45) can be described as a TikTok-format odyssey through present-day troll country. We follow Karilampi together with artist Agassi Bangura as they walk 40 km across the fringes of the mythical Scandinavian landscape.

“Milady Auras” consists of “auras” that are typically assembled by an algorithm. Here, they have been put together manually from hundreds of PNG files, creating new versions and physical avatars of a digital collection. Karilampi has designed a collection of glow-in-the-dark stickers, made in special 3M vinyl, typically used on oil rigs to show directions in the dark. These motifs overlay the “aura” prints; playing with currency symbols and the heavily tokenized practice of graphic design.