Magnus Strandberg (b. 1980, Helsinki) is a Helsinki-based visual artist and translator who grew up in Ekenäs. He graduated from Aalto University's School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2015 with a degree in fashion design and costume art, but decided to start working as a visual artist even before graduating. The impetus for the transition to visual art was realizing the potential of the expanded field of painting – processing images, textures and light into place-specific works that take place through mental seeing in space. To all this, he felt he had something to add. Even now, after more than five years of work, Strandberg's production can be seen as a fulfilled artistic period, the series of works of which can be viewed retrospectively as a whole.

The exhibition in space and event online Là-bas→ Magnus Strandberg aims to crystallize the image of Strandberg's body of work to date, but above all give birth to a completely new work created in and for the Là-bas→ performance space. In terms of retrospective, the project includes this presentation, which differs from Strandberg's previous practice in the sense that previous works are not presented by photographic or video documentation but rather the experience of viewing the works is simulated on the exhibition's website. The purpose of the new kind of representation is to bring out the esotericism of Strandberg's aesthetics and also to open it through these visual samples. The language of Strandberg's visual world, which has been challenging to get into because of its technical aspects and its spatial nature, is made accessible in the internet simulation – albeit with the same reservations about ephemeral art that also concern all the live performances made in Studio Là-bas→ during the previous two decades. Like performance art, Strandberg's works cannot, in principle, be documented as such. The aura of virtuality that is part of Strandberg's works cannot be represented by a static photograph, nor by a single video.

A key feature of Magnus Strandberg's body of work is the connection to place and space. The works have a temporal memory, a drama of the lived space and situation. The form-language comes from modernist minimalism, but the set-up, the presentational situation and the viewing experience are freed from the burden of the material rigidity of modernism. Strandberg creates intangible situations, eventful works of art, whose locational space is expanded and whose relationship to history is intentionally unclear and non-linear. In his works, it is obscure where things begin and where they end – in time, space and perception. The viewer settles physically between and within the works, and is, in the mental state of the exhibition, seen together with the author-in-the-shadow through the situation. The shared intersubjective experience is metaphysical, and thus brings closer the non-subjective and non-temporal perspectives. In that situation, modernism is no longer the end of a historical process, but instead cosmic longing and erotic desire beyond time and place. Reflections that are under threat of disappearance emerge and retreat back to the invisible in a faint but indestructible light.