The exhibition focuses on the breaking point that occurred in the late 1960s when Johannesson’s work moved away from the genre of Psychedelic Art and began experimenting with computer-generated graphics. The selection of works encompasses the poster series The Danish Collection (1967-69), presented together for the first time in Stockholm. The works were realized in the context of the Galleri Cannabis, an artist-run production and exhibition space started by Johannesson and his wife, artist Charlotte Johannesson, in 1965, which became a center for diverse social communities in Malmö. One of the eleven works, Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness! (1968), was commissioned by Lund's Konsthall to publicize the exhibition ‘Underground’, but soon became the pretext for repeated censorship of Johannesson's work.

Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness!, 1968, 62 x 85 cm 

Lithography printed by Permild & Rosengreen Copenhagen
Courtesy the artist 

This routing process of perforated cards can be considered a sort of ‘memory’, an idea recovered by Johannesson to reveal a little-known and somewhat under-theorized piece of art history from the late 1960s, defined by the advent of the first computers. However, his exhibition title transforms this process into ‘memery’, taking its inspiration from Dr. Susan Blackmore. The British writer and psychologist argues that ideas replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus, that humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, made of self-replicating ‘life forms’ spreading themselves via human consciousness by means of the technologies that we have created.¨