Black–White / The Heart shaped House (Södertälje, Malmö, Rostock)

Black-White / The Heartshaped House. Installation about light, darkness and unhappy love.
Amos Anderson Art Museum 1997, Södertälje Konsthall 1998, Malmö Konstmuseum 2000, Rostock Kunsthalle 2000, Wäinö Aaltonen Art Museum (WAM) 2003. The work is now in the collections of the Wäinö Aaltonen Art Museum (WAM).

For the MAP biennale 1997 in Helsinki Andersson made a work about the only thing in life which is really black and white, the feelings of a lost love. The physical part of the work is a house in the shape of a heart. When you attend the white side, you meet 25 different lamps from the 60:ties and 70:ties, reminding of Andersson’s visual memories of lamp shops when he was young. The lamp shops were almost magical in the dark Finnish winter nights.
These lamps are controlled by a computer and they dim and glow slowly in time with Anderson’s breathing in three circles, with a short time span between the circles. The black side of the house has a small heart made of 200 fibres optics on the roof.

The physical installation has a virtual complemental part, which was shown on Internet and on a computer besides the installation. Here you could find a story about a man turning into a lipstick and texts about darkness and light, specially written for this project, by Jan-Erik Andersson, Dr. Päivi Mehtonen and the Archbishop of Finland John Wikström.