FRIEZE

Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden

If ‘The Promise of Happiness’, Kostis Velonis’s exhibition at Signal, seems oddly melancholic, it’s a bit thanks to Greece. The events that took place in the artist’s home country during recent months, along with the nation’s role in the European debt crisis, act as the backdrop for a series of new works that claim, according to the press release, to offer a ‘nuanced analysis of the Swedish welfare state’. With titles such as Proposal for a Monument Ready to Collapse (Welfare State)  (all works 2011), the collection of sculptures, posters and slide projections on view point to the impending demise of social democratic models while at the same time alluding to the ways that their ideological underpinnings are expressed in design and architecture.