Jan Håfström

Jan Håfström

(Born 1937, works in Stockholm)

Graf Spee, 2007

Doors and windows from Wanås, audio, DVD stills

For Jan Håfström’s first exhibition at Wanås Konst in 1991, he created the work The Spanish Armada. In 2007, he was invited again and made Graf Spee, a permanent version of the work, this time in collaboration with Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena and Carl Michael von Hausswolff. Wanås became the site for their project about the Admiral Graf Spee, a German battleship that was scuttled by its captain outside Montevideo in Uruguay in 1939. Håfström created the assemblage of old windows with a film sequence by Fabra Guemberena and electronic music by von Hausswolff. In connection with the exhibition Unvergessen (Graf Spee III) in 2014, the installation was completed with the skulls, the sign, and the ship’s bell. The project is an intersectional node for the three artists. “Without a doubt, we see a common fascination in extreme expressions, within which death is perhaps the most important element,” as Fabra Guemberena commented in 2014.