On a wall sits a nail, oddly enough the wrong way round, with its head to the white painted surface. From its point hangs a chain consisting of four more nails, barely touching each other. An impossible arrangement, were it not for the invisible magnetic force that counteracts the otherwise stable law of gravity according to which everything fall.

Nina Canell’s sculptures generally consist of materials that are normally used for specific purposes. Such as nails, electricity, air, water, chewing gum and sound. Canell draws our attention to them and turns them into agents in their own right. Thereby, she also destabilises the traditionally fixed form of sculpture, in favour of processes, situations and events. Accentuations of energy and movement recur frequently in her art. The work Three Long Milliseconds is an accentuation of this kind. From a height, a piece of natural rubber migrates towards the floor in a motion so slow that it is barely visible to the eye. The sooty trail on a small stick in Halfway Between Opposite Ends could be seen as its polar opposite. This work was created by passing 4,000 volts through the wood. (…)

Canell has chosen to call the exhibition Mid-Sentence, and says that “this can be interpreted as a point, not necessarily halfway, but as a freestanding coordinate”. It can be understood as something without a known origin, where the meaning or ending is as yet indefinite.(…)

As the artist writes: “Cables are the opposite of sentimental. The current is only capable of carrying the current. Cable stumps are cross-sections of a vocabulary of interruptions. A cut-off form. Ending mid-sentence.”

– Fredrik Liew, curator