INCONTINENT STRUCTURE I: BARRAGE FOR KARLSTAD
Self leaking sculpture made up of sofa cushions, sandbags, circulating water and rug, 2016

Incontinence is a term which often is used for describing a physical occurrence entailing difficulties to control one’s body. But the term can also translate the Greek term Akrasia which refers to a lack of self-control and moderation.
Hanna Ljungh’s sculpture series Incontinent Structures, a self leaking sculpture made up of sofa cushions and sand bags as well as an installation of collected images and of dams put together into a slide show, can elicit our need and desire for leakage, that which can, should and is allowed to leak out and the control efforts linked to this.

Barrages are buildings of society or monuments of a civilization. Resources and prestige have been invested in them. If the dam does not hold it means a great defeat and a threat, both physically for a surrounding and also morally against a whole society. Lack of control is a danger and anxiety for both the individual and for our contemporary society. The visual characteristics of our modern and monumental barrages has strong ties to modernisms clean forms and clear aesthetics. Here, modernism’s belief in categorizations and maintaining separations is referenced as well.

The sound of a water cascade can be understood to have healthy effects on us humans who to a great part consist of water. Barrages and sluices give an image of surging water which is led in a controlled manner in order to gain electricity from water power and control where the water ends up. The water’s noise is a sign for environmentally friendly energy production but it also is a sound spectrum which we cannot interpret as meaningful, which lies beyond instances of control such as categorization and interpretation.
Incontinent Structure: Barrage for Karlstad is an update of a sculpture which Hanna Ljungh showed in 2013 in an exhibition in Stockholm and Birmingham.

INCONTINENT STRUCTURE II: GRAND DAMS(RUSSIAN ROULETTE)
Slide projector, contact microphone and amplifier, projection screen, 2016

A carousel slide show of great dam structures from around the globe where every 6th dam has broken down or failed. The sound of the slide projector is amplified
and distorted so that every change of slide resonates as a loud BANG.