October 20 2023 – November 19 2023
“In 2015, I traveled to China in search of my birth mother. Ultimately I did not find her. Instead, a woman who I stayed with gave me a kombucha-mother, and a different kind of mother found me. Since then I have been cultivating that same kombucha-culture with tea and sugar— both materials rooted in fraught relationships to Northern European economies. I started exploring allegories linked to kombucha— as a mother, offspring, caregiver, contaminant, and even parasite hinging on the necessity of continuous care. “
Anna Ting Möller´s work focuses on kombucha as a material potential and follows a material logic. The sculptures are ephemeral and they are constantly morphing. The work itself is, like life, mutable. Möller finds it conceptually important to keep working with the same kombucha-mother, to continue the lineage of offsprings and the examination of a matrilineal “family tree”. The method expands on the relationship between mother-child or child-mother and the fantasy of the fabrications of a child’s origin. The work contemplates on adoption and the idea of private and public loss, it is messy and operates simultaneously on a micro and macro level. It is inherently political and speaks to who has the “right” to become a parent.
The Mother Mushroom, is a colony of yeast and bacteria that ferments the health drink kombucha (this mother also goes by the acronym SCOBY, for Symbiotic Cultures of Bacteria and Yeast).
“I subtract layers of biofilm from the kombucha and transform the material into sculptures. Fermentation is a sort of domestication of living organisms and a jar of a fermenting culture provides a small window into the way that life happens.”
The video work titled “SUN – while humming” (2023) is based on the artist’s memories from their China, where they left abruptly as an infant in 1993. Möller often draws from personal experiences, but creates works that become universally human.
“SUN – while humming” is an experimental essay in first-person narration, a love letter to an unknown country that does not exist and a desire for belonging. The struggle to overcome fear of a state of rootlessness. Filmed between 2016-2018 in China, this story is emblematic of physical travels, but above all inner journeys. The narrative is composed of fragments of incomplete flashbacks. Disjointed but not unpleasant, a bit like the experience of travel itself.
The artist was born in China and adopted by a Swedish family at the age of two. Growing up in Sweden, they were always pointed out as a representative of otherness within Swedish liberal discourse, and interrogations regarding their “place of origin” were unavoidable. People have always assumed that the artist returns “home” when they travel to China, but in China they feel like they are the cartoon character Bambi on ice, struggling to find their footing. If the artist does not say anything, there’s no friction; but as soon as they speak, people will know that they don’t belong in China.
The video embodies fragments and traces of a lost past, to better understand and exist in the present. The sharing of the artist’s origin has often been forced upon them. With this film, they choose to share with strangers what it can mean to be one adoptee and to move through the world in a fragmented way.
