Polity immunodeficiency

Video work at Fremantle Arts Centre, Australia 19 May-15 July 2012. The overall exhibition was called Projektet and was a collaborative project with Amanda Newall, Senior Lecturer in Sculpture at Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. The exhibition had two separate video works, Blood Run by Newall and Polity Immunodeficiency by Johansson. The latter piece was written and facilitated/directed by Johansson, who was also one of its performers. Moreover, Johansson conducted laboratory experiments with his own blood for the work.
The video expresses an absurdly belligerent dialogue (linguistically inspired by the first half hour of Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket) which draws on the (post) colonial situation in Western Australia with its hegemonic ethnic forces in stark opposition to a group of subjugated living beings. The costumes are depersonalised and typifies the metaphorical rationale of the project, namely to juxtapose the postcolonial political divisions with the way the immune system functions when confronted with unfamiliar antigens (bacteria, viruses, parasites), which is mostly by lethal force but may also be by accommodating strategies if the strangers are unfamiliar but benign. The immunological scenario is also exemplified by interspersed microscopic sequences which shows the artists’ own blood when confronted with an aggressive type of e-coli bacteria.
The two modes of video depiction were being possible due to a double residency at SymbioticA (a bio-artistic research lab at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia) and Fremantle Arts Centre. Johansson adapted his previous research on community theatre and HIV/AIDS (cf. REF monograph) and thus informed the project with immunological interpretations as well as devising methods in a series of workshops with local acting students in preparation of the recorded performances.