Joanne Grüne-Yanoff

Cassandra’s Escape, May 8-June 9, 2025 Galleri Duerr, Stockholm

In Cassandra’s Escape, visitors are invited into a few of Cassandra’s secret rooms.

The air shimmers with sounds of rustling wings, heartbeats, urgent whispers, nightingale songs.

Somewhere in time, Cassandra, gravity bound, looks around the room and up to the skies, thinking about flight.

Each object is a clue, a way to harness imagination, an escape.

In this in-between place, this vast space of possibility, Cassandra flaps, jump, spins, and soars.

The room electrifies; Cassandra stretches into the flash and escapes.

Along the way, ingredients are gathered:

Lichen and moss and twigs from deeply rooted trees touch the air;

Honey and wax and wings and feathers and eggshells of flyers vibrate;

Threads, paints, texts, notes, scores, strings and reeds are assembled.

Cassandra fills glass flasks with the collection; repositories that carry memory, imagination, possibility.

Nearby the walls hold images of transformation; hands that shift with threads and wings, texts threaded with stories, different Cassandras finding flight.

A ladder of trees, wrapped and bound with drawings and texts connects earth to sky in one room, in the other a sail hangs like a rope, furled and trussed.

Images of Nightingales flicker and, for an instant, there is a different breath, another way.

Cassandra returns, carrying new memories, air accompanying each step.

A soundscape of layers including birdsong, the flapping of wings during taking off, and a subtle heartbeat welcomes visitors into the exhibition G R A V I T Y by Swedish-American artist Joanne Grüne-Yanoff. The sounds are evocative and lay the groundwork for the exhibition which unfolds into three scenes spread throughout the gallery’s rooms.

Grüne-Yanoff is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, sound, sculpture, photo-based images and drawing. Accompanying this process is a character she has developed: Cassandra, who metaphorically embodies Grüne-Yanoff’s practice - that of a grounded being who looks up to the sky, thinking about flight.

In sculpture, soundscapes and wall works, Cassandra appears, flapping and jumping repeatedly into the skies. These small gestures of enacted imagination provide Cassandra with strength; In the jumps she finds freedom. As gravity returns her home, she carries air, and flight.

The first room of Gravity invites visitors to walk through a series of connections to the exhibition, allowing glimpses into the artist’s working methods. Props for Cassandra, artist sketches and notes, curious assemblages, and the soundscape foreshadow the exhibition’s narrative.

In the main space of the gallery a series of unique lenticular prints show Cassandra  flapping and jumping, often wearing the props we saw in the first room. These lenticular works are video stills which Grüne-Yanoff has combined into unique prints that move when the viewer walks by.

In the third room is Grüne-Yanoff’s award-winning short film The Cassandra Cycle: Memory, which tells a version of Cassandra’s story through film.

Ultimately, in G R A V I T Y, Grüne-Yanoff builds a world that is as surreal as it is universal.

Opening Reception 28/9 kl 17-20    Galleri Duerr    Hudiksvallsgatan 6

Text: Anne Klontz Image: Cassandra’s Quiet (Skebobruk), 2023, Unique Lenticular on Aludibond, 70 x120 cm

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