Dear Jesus, Do something!

Title: Dear Jesus, Do something!
Artist: Johan Bergström Hyldahl
Location: The atrium, Stockholm School of Economics
Architectural work: The Giant Socle by Aron Fidjeland and Axel Wolgers
Curator: Isak Nilson, SSE Art Initiative

The benign apocalypse—could it exist? Though it might sound ridiculous, this question, and others related to it, arise in the face of Johan Bergström Hyldahl’s artistic oeuvre. 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 the exhibition Dear Jesus, Do something!, named after Hyldahl’s film and located in the atrium of the Stockholm School of Economics, the theme again centres on the apocalypse. The work is shown inside The Giant Socle, an architectural work by Aron Fidjeland and Axel Wolgers.

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 strange 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 faces a circle of post-industrial debris on its surface. The new world turns out to be the rear of the old one.

The surrounding structure by Fidjeland and Wolgers has a similar effect on the viewer. The architects flip the conventional scale of the art gallery, enlarging certain forms while turning others inside out. A feeling of liquidity and transformation begins the moment visitors step onto the structure. The room feels odd and uncomfortable—an intermediary space that is at once familiar and unknown.

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. Exhibition curated by Isak Nilson, SSE Art Initiative.

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.