On 28 September, Art Sonje Center presents a Screening & Talk of artist Magnus Bärtås, The Strangest Stranger.

The Strangest Stranger

2016, 75 min.

English Subtitles

A Japanese Jew named Joni Waka known as “Johnnie Walker” due to the Japanese not being able to accept a caucasian as a Japanese, is portrayed as a main character in Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel “Kafka on the Shore”. Joni Waka is one of the last descendants of generations of Jewish traders in Asia.

His sense of being Japanese but not Japanese  gives him an uninhibited freedom to greet and talk to  people at random, often openly exchanging personal backgrounds. Confronted with social pressure, he seems to ignore local norms and customs taking advantage of his outsider position and freedom as “the strangest stranger” (ichiban henna gaijin) to create a space for his everyday comedy.  Joni Waka is like a human chameleon unconsciously changing accents, languages, and manner in his adapting to the people he encounters or the place he happens to find himself in.

About the artist
Magnus Bärtås
Born in 1962 in Sweden, Magnus Bärtås currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. He is as an artist, a writer and a professor of fine arts at Konstfack in Stockholm, working with text, video, objects and installation. His dissertation in artist research You Told Me – Work Stories and Video Essays, which examines narrative models in contemporary art and the practice of the video essay, was published in May 2010. Together with Fredrik Ekman Bärtås has published four books of essays.  All Monsters Must Die (2015) was nominated for the August Prize. Exhibitions include The 1st Research Pavilion: Experimentality at the Venice Biennale (2015), The Miracle in Tensta (Theoria) at Tensta Konsthall (2014), Rainbow in the Dark at Malmö Art Museum 2015, ABCDEFGHI at Marabouparken, Stockholm (2013), and the 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012). In 2010, his film Madame & Little Boy (2009) won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.In 2016 The The Art hall of Gothenburg, Sweden made a retrospective exhibition of Bärtås’ work.