EXIT

Pieces of driftwood hang silently from thick translucent lines. The wood feels smooth to the touch, having been caressed by the salt and the water since finding itself in the sea. The edges are frayed. Echoing the sea from which they came, the stones form an abstracted and fragmented shore. They are a steel grey, with tinges of blue and green and lines of time crossing through them in mineral ribbons. They form fragments of transcriptions of actual events from millions of years ago. They used to smell of salt. Now they smell like everything else here. They are now in this place, frozen for a moment in their journey. They will return to the shore after this is all over.

Of Nowhere and Everywhere is an affective and relational mixed media installation experienced through the physical movement and participation of the viewer.

Photography is a by-product of light sensitivity.

This installation will make the light sensitive process visible.

Two chemicals will mix and when affected by sunlight the liquid will change colour from yellow to green to blue. Playful experiments are key elements in any process of discovery, this installation will consist of a variety of different experiments both fixed and unfixed. Some experiments will be active (unfixed) throughout the exhibition and some earlier by-products will have slowed down to the point where we perceive them as halted (fixed).

“You never encountered the photographic process in its fixed form; you observed the changing light, never the fixed simulations that we call photographs. I understand the limitations of the photographic apparatus and process, and by understanding that I practice how I understand the limitations of my sensorium.”

Excerpt from Critical reflection - Letter to G, Diana Lindbjerg 2017

Photography is often understood as a representation of something else, a picture. A picture is an end-result of a process; a two-dimensional simulation of something that was three-dimensional.

This installation brings photography back to basic, light sensitivity. There are no pictures in the installation, no camerawork, no simulation. Just light-sensitive materials in various states, some fixed, some not.

Text and performance 

In a series of performances the problem is text, text and text. An indeterminancy, where the act of writing has controlled almost all development of thought, constantly moving my fingers from a static position. Here, with the process of writing and reading, to read means 'to pick', and writing becomes just another way of reading, of grasping information. A consumation of content that becomes like a passing through of other voices. The work is based on the idea of performing, as an expectation from the "outside" world, to perform bodily. As a writer one might "feel" passive. In some way my daily routine is simular to that of the poet's. But there is a problem with reading, namely that the body becomes passive. Thus, one cannot act while one reads. I want to continue working even when I get up, but it is not necessarily a symptom of writing. Text are in some ways comunicated and performed, but it can easily fail when one tries to reach an audience without knowing who the reader is. In other words: Who is this for?

Medium/material: (Wood, light bulbs, acrylic paint, and performer in silver lamé shorts, sneakers,  portable voice amplifier and wireless headphones. Frieze London Art Fair, 2016), Wallpaper and sound.

During Frieze London Art Fair, October, 2016 Mahmoud Khaled used an iconic piece produced in 1991 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called Untitled (Go-go Dancing Platform), where for five minutes each day, an unscheduled and unannounced dancer clad in silver lamé shorts, ascends a lighted platform to dance to music of his own choosing, played through earphones so only the dancer could hear. The platform functions as an art object or minimalist sculpture all day, except during those five minutes when the dancer transforms it by his presence. In Khaled’s iteration, there was also a dancer but he did not dance. As he was moving around on the platform, he was struggling to think about his own existence as an art object demanding a new form of art. Instead of a Walkman, the dancer carried a portable voice amplifier typically used by teachers and tour guides. He performed a text authored by Khaled and based on correspondences between him and a number of art practitioners and theorists who question the role and future of contemporary art in the current violent and complex moment. 

Multimedia installation

The unicorn is an image without a self. It has no purpose, no abilities, it belongs to no specific myth or religion, it has no origin, but still it appears across cultures throughout history. It conceals the meaning of its representation to the point where one could say it only represents its own non-existence. It cannot be captured, although scientists and philosophers, such as Gottfried W. Leibniz, have tried to prove its existence based on visual evidence.

Today we live in the age of the unicorn. As a term used to describe private companies younger then 10 years and with an estimated value of $1 billion or more, it expands way beyond the world of finance and economy. As a metaphor it performs the borderline between rational and irrational knowledge.

The installation short-circuits two case studies that both investigate different instances of addressing seemingly irrational reasoning. By using up-to-date lasercutting technology it reconstructs the unicorn's historical and symbolical relation to science, logic and value in the form of a relief.

This rather unexpected relationship runs counter to the format of the open letter as an appeal to reason. By exposing rhetoric phrases and gestures outside of the context of their actual cause and reducing them to text on a LED screen, it reveals a random selection of selves without their image.

Everything lives out here which makes it difficult to speak right now is a platform where the different species of the internet: worms, viruses, blobs, globs, ghosts, probes, etc. come together. These digital ‘species’ have ascended from the core of the internet to the surface of reality where they manifest in physical state on this platform. They detach themselves from their environment and create an heterogeneous space where they are unable to communicate through their regular channels. Instead they need to adapt to their new environment and search for different means of communication.

Video and Performance. 

Toward Utopia takes three elements that depict my trip from Ramallah to Norway and the extreme physical, mental, and behavioral change that I experienced.  I use two different mediums, video and performance, to depict the journey.  Through video surveillance, we see the two methods of transportation that have shaped my development as a struggling artist in occupied Ramallah, Palestine and the change of setting and reality in Trondheim, Norway.  The two different locations are compared visually and sonically, revealing hidden dimensions of the systems and patterns that shaped my experience.  A utopia,and the associated freedom is depicted through my performance responding to the exhibition Beiti, which means home in Arabic, by Laurent Mareschal in which I vacuum, dance on, and clean the area while surveilling myself privately.  Taking out all of my frustrations, this performance reflects and responds to the monotonic and never ending reality that surrounds my dance of freedom.  

In collaboration with Øystein Kjørstad Fjeldbo & Amalia Fonfara

Multi-channel film installation / Performance  / Drum & Red velvet Curtains (2017).

Prelude to ( 2, 2 ) O is rooted in the etymology of kinema and topos. The research explores a meta-critique of sight perception in relation to virtual, real and imaginary spaces.Taking the structure of a (2,2) mode shamanic drum as a reference,  the artwork explores the possibility for  re-combinations and simultaneities of the real-and-imagined. It offers a  geo-narrative where imagination is activated in a topological way by connecting two venues in Trondheim; Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder & Gråmølna Kunstmuseum. The hybrid spaces present the use of technology and its relation to knowledge, through systems and languages found in techno-animism, cinema and hauntology practices.  

At Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder:

( 2,2 ) O

Sonic Architecture of the Inner Space. Interactive sound composition (2017).

(2,2) 0 is a cinematic space where the visual external stimulus is removed. An invitation to navigate through a kinematic montage from a spatial psychoacoustic experience, where the imagination seeks to alter and proliferate, reverberating through the deep cavities of the psyche. The inner space is mapped conceiving another kind of system that isn’t represented spatially but is instead constructed from patterns of single events remapped from intensities, interferences and temporal sensitivity, delays and elastics rhythms. 8 chambers exist simultaneously, each one containing different facets of the acoustic information: it carry sonic characteristics, latency, loudness and modulations of rate and direction. In this way one is orientated within a journey through the architecture of the inner space and towards expanding outer qualities of the imagination. An inner journey towards a spatiality of ambience, atmosphere and spatial self; the heart may pre-echo endless openings, without the eye, space is navigated by being remembered or imagined.

LARPY: Starring Me, You and Chief Belief Officer (officer is missing), HD video, 30 minutes, 2017

Chief Belief Officer, Digital animation, 30 second loop, 2017 

Where's the Alibi?, closed workshop with Live Action Role Players and Moaners (a collective at the art academy), black board,  table, chairs, Jelly Fortune, fake plant (2017). 

This project comes out of my research with/in Nordic Live Action Role-Playing (LARP). Nordic LARP is a carefully organized game in which people play out characters physically, in a fictional story, in a setting that makes them feel like they are “really there”. There is no audience in LARP. The installation consists of three artworks. Each, in its own way, pivots around the potential and possibilities of reality being born from fiction. 

The essay film, LARP: Starring Me, You and Chief Belief Officer considers three facets of live action role-playing —as a method for training at work, as a pedagogic tool and as recreation and play— to be read simultaneously. It presents the complexities of the relationship between the somatic, emotions and contingency within the conditions of live action role-playing, set in a vastly neo-liberal landscape. 

Where’s the Alibi? is an installation of furniture that works as a setting for a workshop taking place outside opening hours of the gallery. The work invites both the viewer and the participants of the workshop to reflect on the paradoxical nature of LARP to address society but in isolation. For the viewer, the absence of the action is reflected in the word ‘alibi’ in the title. Commonly meaning ‘an excuse’, here the word evokes a spatial idea of an “elsewhere”. 

Lastly, the disembodied text animation of Chief Belief Officer, is a motif in the installation that acts as a constant reminder of how Live Action Role-Playing works.

My recollections are all that is left of you, Print of a drowned Polaroid on textile, emerged in water (2017)

Når ingen andre ser, Drowned selfportraits, collection of Polaroids, (2016-2017).

‘Når ingen andre ser’ is a project about identity, death and being alive. Affected by our surroundings we are constantly changing, evolving and dissolving. Sometimes, it seems, we loose ourselves completely. Who are we then, when we don`t even remember ourselves?

Using self-portraits taken with a Polaroid camera I have explored the changes a portrait goes through while going through a traumatic experience, in this case, drowning in water. The water has been affected with different emotions, to test Masaru Emotos theory about water having memory. Will the molecules react different to the different emotions, and manifest itself in the Polaroid?

When drowning, the emulsion inside the Polaroid starts to expand; it curls up the insides of the small frame it is given, resembling more a textile than a flat photograph. ‘My recollections are all that is left of you’ is a large-scale attempt to freeze the motions of the Polaroid in water by using a print on fabric emerged in a glass-tank with water.

With Guerrilla Optimists and Moaners.

The health of our communal body has been compromised. The awareness for freedom and spontaneity has been blocked through attitudes in which we choreograph our bodies and voices in public space. This is a call to awareness to local symptoms that point to universal conditions of lack, inadequacy and misery. We are inviting all interested in producing experimental sounds with objects and their voice to recalibrate the ambience of a tinny square, and the vibrations of our bodies. In cohort with two artists collectives, Rosina Ivanova will stream the sounds of a live walking action with the Guerrilla Optimists from Athens and the sounds from a voice session with Moaners, to a nameless square in Trondheim. This is a call to action to intervene with the acoustics of the place, rehearse experimental traces of voice, bodily formations and listening tactics. The live streaming is also an invitation to join in for seven deep sound listening events at the benches and at the center of a square in front of Solsiden mall entrance Starbucks/Danske Bank building-Beddingen 2 str.

Live events Programme

Moaning Sessions from Trondheim with Moaners (exhale)

Place: Square between Beddingen 2-4-6str, Trondheim

25, 26, 27 May, 2017

15:00-15:50

Hope Signals from Athens with Guerrilla Optimists (inhale)

Place: Square between Beddingen 2-4-6str, Trondheim

1, 2, 3 June, 2017

12:00-13:00

Short Musical Walk with Instruments from Gråmølna to Verftsbrua (Flower bridge) - Celebratory Finale (move)

Trenerys gate 9str, starts at TKM Gråmølna entrance

11 June, 2017

16:00-16:10

Canvas 130/195, charcoal 130cm, kinetic machine

Mixed Media Installation

 ´0 <=> ∞´ is a calculation of infinity as a probability. The installation generates an intersection of software (its operation code-language) and 2-dimensional space of canvas. The black line drawn on the surface of canvas by kinetic machine, `revels´ the infinity of points on plane; where at the same time, charcoal dust on the floor indicate a time interval. Within this work, Burek suggest infinity in a visually perceptible manner.

Line is lying in the basis of the painting’s essence, of which the painting’s surface defines physical space. Operation code makes a mark on the surface of painting with charcoal within, exposing language of software that indicates it corporeal. The simplicity of the drawing is fulfilled here and now, at the basic level, where a trace of a drawing becomes a visual representation of the language and its presence in a time interval. The line is at the same time presentation of infinite points, exposed on the surface of the canvas as a cross section of infinite lines running through its space. Where at the same time charcoal clashes with the surface of the canvas creating dust on the floor indicating a time interval, referring to Malevich´s assumption of transforming in the ´zero´ form. Materializing from ´nothing´ to creation, ´it is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins´.

The line positioned on height of 130cm refers to the blue Scotch tape used by Edward Krasiński in his works, in order to ´pull´ out from 2-dimensional space an infinity expression.

Burek bases her research in a comprehensive examination of contemporary artists, thinkers, and philosophers, her investigation concerns subjects like the concept of meaning, understanding of language, logic, programing and the foundation of mathematics.

Artist produces a variety of works between sculptural objects, artist's books, drawings, and paintings, recently researching technology and programming in relation to art expression. Context and temporality create the existential condition of Sandra´s work.

Video Installation, length: 06:20, looped

In an airport hotel, just outside Trondheim, a man is caught between wakefulness and sleeping, between time zones. He is drawn in by the allure of the pool, gazing downward at the water and aluminum bottom. The camera enters in to the reciprocal exchange between the phenomenological qualities of the pool and the man, a viscous atmosphere in which boundaries of the self and other are delineated. The video installation offers this mutually constitutive figuring-out as a set of conditions, which can be occupied in the space of the work.

Mixed Media Installation

Grimoire takes its name from books of incantations written in cryptic language to protect its authorship and readers. The term as I use it, originates in 18th century France, however, books of magic have been dated as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. I use this name to refer to the history of oppression through means of accessible healthcare and its relationship to fear of autonomous women.
My survey begins in the 3000s B.C.E. and continues to the present. Since 2015, I have been creating a book that interweaves a timeline with excerpts from texts mentioned, quotes from figures listed, mythological ties, and various drawings and properties of natural abortifacients listed throughout. 

By creating an installation based on the contents of the book, I shed light on preexisting histories and the power oppressed peoples had through this knowledge, the ability to make decisions, and how these things have been utilized to control women and civilizations throughout history.  I reference the occult without engaging in costumed depictions to dismantle fears of or preconceived notions of the subject. In addition, I hope to bridge homeopathy, herbal medicine, witchcraft, shamanism, and technological health care. I endeavor to present the power to heal as a positive alternative archetype and autonomy as a potent and ordinary magic.

Sculpture

Ware explores themes such as mass production and manufacturing in relation to the individual and the unique object. It is an imaginary industry, employed by women workers exclusively, in the process of restructuring from one sector to another. My research questions the value of material, craftsmanship, and labor from a contemporary perspective where technology, digitalization, and increased efficiency prevails. What does it mean for our understanding of economic and social structures, and how can we identify power in the new system? The loom is often the starting point because it initiated the first computers, programming and punch cards; the idea of the both digital and analogue tool. By applying mechanical, repetitive processes in the execution of the work, I explore the body and human capacity. Suggestive rather than insistent these surveys become into poetic sculptures; Studies of materiality, rhythm, and repetition, where I at the same time both continue and problematize craftsmanship in a conceptual context.

My body of work is a summary of an ongoing photography process started in 2011 in an attempt to depict the spaces I refer to as Home. My visual research creates the relationship between photography and concepts of memory, trauma, and space. I explore the possibilities of ‘photographic abstraction’ in order to let go of personal childhood memories by obscuring the spaces of my home landscapes during the printing process in the darkroom. I manipulate traditional methods of production in photography, to create images that deal with distraction, disappearance and obscure landscapes.