Fienden (in Swedish “enemy“) is a group of Swedish-origin artists, designers, film makers, photographers, musicians, dj’s who focus on highlighting issues concerning culture and observations of everyday life. For the first time in Estonia present their paintings, videos and graphical art pieces and T-shirt collection two of the founders and core members of the group - Max Norman and Christian Saldert.
Young artists residing in Stockholm laid the foundation for the world-famous clothes´ brand, when Christian Saldert studied at the Swedish Royal University College of Art. Their wish was to break free from the traditional oil painting and to communicate with the general public in a more direct and also cheaper manner. The young artists were disturbed by the masses of young people, who were wearing T-shirts with absurd messages that had been created by mass brands, of the meaning of which actually nobody really cared for. The boys created decorative printed t-shirts secretly loaded with all kinds of horrible propaganda, such as for the nazis, bizarre pornography, the weapon industry etc. Soon this art project did undermine itself cause Stockholm´s trend circles started to buy this creations and they just hadn´t the conscience to keep fooling them, so they ended the project.

Christian Saldert, dividing his time between Prague and Stockholm, is flirting in his creation with both surrealism and modern philosophy, joining psychoanalysis and politics. The prevailing leitmotif of his works is how the “real thing” almost never corresponds to the authenticity that has been attached to it. To Saldert the authentic always reappears, not in an uncontaminated pure form, but through a “parallax gap” that the copy renders possible. This has been figuratively shown in one of his works, where the polymorphic identities of nuns – religious, political and sexual – are at the same time unable to be fully realized and are therefore really authentic. On his large-size paintings Christian is joining with careless facility by the clip-art method popular culture and symbols of thinking of the western Christian countries that originate from the vast depths of the Internet. Saldert´s manner of working is based on the rhizome theory of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattar that uses instead of a structure horizontally and non-hierarchically bifurcating center-free disorder. This gives the artist the freedom to join and put onto the canvas seemingly not joinable items and characters. In this manner on are joined on his painting “Misconception of Bas Jan Ader” Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Daisy Duck, etc. 
The other half of the artists´ duo, Max Norman, exposes on the gallery walls bright-coloured graphical sheets that have been created in the silk screen painting technology. These are poster-type, retro-style, modern touch-possessing glances of the individualistic era into the eternal parasite problems that are being every day offered to us by the media to chew like gum. Norman examines them through a cynical prism, using for its forwarding silk screen painting technology with nostalgic colors and manners of depiction. Similarly to Christian, also Max takes the pictures, ripping them out of the context, from the Internet picture base.

Media:
AK Kultuuriuudised/ ETV (Est)
Fineden in ArtDepoo/ Raadio 4/Tatjana Kosmõnina, Olga Temnikova (Rus)

Some photos from the opening provided by eeva.ee: