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Photo: Lili Zaneta/TKM.
Images shown together can make us see connections that we weren’t aware of or didn’t want to see. Historically, artists have intentionally shocked audiences to awareness by the introduction of scenes of war and disaster into the safe space of the gallery.
In Trondheim, the sea is closely connected to our economy, to life, and for centuries was the main link to the outside world. The source of Norway’s riches, the sea, was also associated with death and danger and was the route by which news of the conflicts and horrors of the outside world reached Trondheim.
The backdrop in this room is a 1:1 reproduction of Vanessa Baird’s I Don’t Want to be Anywhere but Here I Am (2015). Created at the height of the refugee crisis, Baird’s monumental oil pastel drawing (which is in the museum’s collection) contrasts the horror of ghost-like figures drowning and dead in an unruly sea with images of crumbling bourgeois interiors, figures in seeming emotional paralysis, and disturbing fairytale imagery. An act of furious self-accusation, Baird’s grotesque caricatures reflect how shut off from deepfelt empathy we are and how, effectively, we reduce the refugees drowning on Europe’s shores to racial “others”.
