Dear Jesus, Do something!

The benign apocalypse, could it exist? Though it might sound ridiculous, this question, and others related to it, arise throughout Johan Bergström Hyldahl’s artistic practice. From his earliest works, themed around history’s great economic theories and the systematic restructuring of the world, there has always been a streak of reimagination. His world seems to be in constant breakdown and, at the same time, ready to reinvent itself.

In Dear Jesus, Do something!, the artist combines Cold War imagery, visionary science and commercial ambition to examine how promises of progress can lead back to destruction. The exhibition placed the film inside The Giant Socle, making the surrounding architecture part of the encounter with the work.

After the Second World War, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton observed how the destruction of Hiroshima had produced what he called “nuclearism” among some survivors: a deification of nuclear weapons to the point of viewing them as a source of security and even salvation. Like the underpinning idea of political revolution, a destructive force can be turned into a constructive reimagination of the old world - you must destroy the world in order to save it.

Dear Jesus, Do something! similarly immerses us in a world of “creative destruction”, to use the old adage of capitalism. This fictitious world seems so busy trying to salvage itself that no one realizes that apocalypse is the one constant of all human progress.

Original text by Robert Stasinski, art critic.

The surrounding structure of the exhibition, designed by architects Fidjeland and Wolgers, has an effect on the viewer similar to that of the film. Here, they have flipped the conventional scale of the art gallery and enlarged certain forms while turning others inside out. The feeling of liquidity and transformation is felt the moment you walk onto the first step of the structure. The room feels odd and uncomfortable; perhaps because it is an intermediary, at the same time something familiar and unknown.

HD video with stereo sound, 24 minutes

Dear Jesus, Do something! is a strange parody of the Cold War era, complete with apocalyptic fearmongering, a utopian discoverer of the moon, and the uneasy interaction between business and visionary science.

Jasper, an ambitious but inept astronaut, hopes that his lunar mission will reveal a brave new world and completely transform his view of life. Yet his uncanny journey across the moon ends when he encounters a circle of post-industrial debris on its surface. The new world turns out to be the rear of the old one.

The film moves between absurd humour and catastrophe to question scientific ambition, economic faith and humanity’s recurring desire to start again. Read more about the film on Cecilia Hillström Gallery’s exhibition page.

Johan Bergström Hyldahl (born 1984) is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm. He holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where he studied from 2008 to 2014, including MFA studies at Hunter College in New York. Before his art education, he completed an MSc in Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Working across film, sculpture, photography and installation, Bergström Hyldahl combines humour and absurdity with darker questions about science, economics, discovery and human progress. His works often present romantic landscapes, ambitious inventions and encounters with the unknown, only to reveal the instability or failure beneath them.

The moon is a recurring motif in his practice: a destination for exploration, an isolated celestial body, and sometimes a character with its own agenda. In Dear Jesus, Do something!, this fascination becomes a way to examine how visions of progress can turn into paralysis, ruin or another version of the world we already know.

Bergström Hyldahl has exhibited at institutions including Sven-Harrys konstmuseum and Turku Art Museum, as well as Cecilia Hillström Gallery. His work is represented in private and corporate collections in Sweden and internationally, and in the collection of Public Art Agency Sweden.