FORGOTTEN TIMELINE
(2026)
ERM
11 June - 18 June
Description
Pop Art emerged in the 1950s and 60s as a radical shift in how art related to everyday life. Rather than focusing on grand historical narratives or personal expression, artists turned their attention to consumer culture, advertising, comic books, packaging, celebrities, and the visual language of mass production. By elevating ordinary objects and images into the realm of art, Pop Art challenged traditional hierarchies of value and questioned what deserved our attention.
Yet beneath its bright surfaces and playful aesthetics, Pop Art was never merely about popular culture. It reflected a deeper transformation in society - a world increasingly mediated through images, brands, and mass communication. The movement revealed how collective desires, aspirations, and identities were being shaped through visual culture itself.
Post-Pop Art inherits this fascination with the constructed image, but shifts its attention from consumer objects to psychological landscapes. Rather than examining the products and symbols of mass culture, it explores the memories, emotions, and identities that emerge from a world saturated by images.
In the work of ERM (Emanuel Ringborg Mankert), this transition becomes particularly visible. His joyful robotic figures, cartoon-like characters, and vibrant visual universe initially evoke familiarity and comfort. Yet beneath the playful surface lies something more elusive - a longing for memories that may never have existed, a nostalgia for imagined futures and invented pasts.
ERM’s work inhabits a space where collective memory, digital culture, childhood imagination, and technological optimism merge into fictional emotional realities. His characters appear to remember experiences they never had, inviting us to reflect on our own relationship to nostalgia in an age where much of what we remember has been mediated, reconstructed, or entirely fabricated.
Through this lens, ERM’s practice can be understood as a distinctly post-pop condition: a world where the image no longer reflects reality, but instead creates emotional realities of its own. Behind the smiling robots and playful aesthetics lies a quiet exploration of longing, belonging, and the human desire to find comfort in stories - even when those stories were never truly ours.
Artist Statement
The work creates nostalgia for a pop culture that never existed. The Robos appear as characters from a world where they seem to have always been present, in old commercials, forgotten console games, breakfast cereal packaging and animated fragments from a childhood that never quite happened.
Rather than illustrating a fixed story, the works function as fragments from a larger culture: snapshots, signals and artifacts from a timeline that almost makes sense.
I am drawn to visual languages that are immediate: comics, graffiti, advertising, packaging, toys, games and cartoons. These forms are designed to be understood quickly, but they also carry emotion, memory and collective recognition. I use that directness, but try to bend it slightly, so that the image becomes both playful and uncertain.
Forgotten Timeline is not a story to be explained. It is a world to be discovered.
What happens when an artist creates nostalgia for a pop culture that never existed?
With Forgotten Timeline, ERM — Emanuel Ringborg Mankert builds a parallel universe around his recurring robot characters, The Robos. Through painting, sculpture, moving image, and graphic fragments, he creates the illusion of a lost cultural archive — one that feels strangely familiar despite never having existed.
Drawing inspiration from cartoons, toys, arcade games, graffiti, advertising, and pop culture, ERM explores how images shape memory and identity. At the center are The Robos: playful, expressive figures that seem to emerge from a forgotten collective past, caught somewhere between childhood imagination and digital mythology.
Referencing the legacy of Pop Art, ERM updates its language for a new era. Instead of celebrating consumer products, he investigates how fictional images can generate genuine emotional attachment and nostalgia.
At HAS, Forgotten Timeline becomes an encounter with an invented cultural memory — inviting visitors to question not only what they are seeing, but why it feels so familiar
Date
Vernissage: THURSDAY June 11th at 18-21
Artist and Curator presentation at 19
June 11th to June 18th
Artists
ERM - EManuel Ringborg Mankert
About
ERM - Emanuel Ringborg Mankert is a Stockholm-based artist working with visual storytelling across painting, objects and spatial installations.
With a background in advertising, graffiti and pop culture, his practice combines graphic clarity with emotional exaggeration. His work draws from cartoons, comics, games, consumer culture and the visual codes of childhood memory, creating images that feel both immediate and slightly unreliable.
ERM’s practice moves between painting and world-building. Individual works often function as central artifacts, surrounded by objects, moving images and graphic remnants that suggest a broader fictional culture. Through his recurring robot figures — The Robos — he explores recognition, nostalgia, image culture and the emotional charge of things we almost remember.
CREDITS