KiT Masterutstillingen 2018

book, a series of photographs, installation, 2017-18 

An escaping from reality is the theme I have been working for many years.  a grand affair is a project I aimed to connect this theme with my depression that I started to go through after losing my father. I inherited some money from him but because of his death, I have this mental disorder. So I decided to spend this money to pay off my depression. Thinking about an escaping, I came up with an idea of staying in a hotel, as that’s what people do when they ‘escape’; go somewhere and stay in a hotel. I visited expensive hotels and alternative places in London to experience the persona of different characters (such as a posh traveler, a journalist, a hipster) to become someone other than myself, to escape from the depressed self. I changed my makeup, clothes and bags, according to each character I was playing and area I was in. My book contains my drawings, writings, photographs, maps, information such as where, when and how much I spent.

a grand affair is my statement. This is what I do with my depression.

In a society where people leave the countryside to migrate to the cities, I felt the duty to document one of the last heroes that keeps maintaining his farm in balance with the nature: my father.  I went to the Leirvik farm to document the symbiosis between my father and the farm. How each of them depend on the other and how, together, they are much more of the sum of the parts. When he inherited the farm from his parents for being the oldest son, he also inherited with it the principles of the generations that lived there before, the caring for the nature, the helping of the neighbor farms, the simplicity of life. All the effort that my father puts into cutting the old trees in the forest, keeping the deer population healthy and under control, fixing the drainage in the mountains and cutting the weed in the garden, rewards the farm with fresh water and wood for the chimney and rewards him with venison, berries, mushrooms, fish and a place of meditation. 

the lie of the land mixed media installation, archival material

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History 
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge"”unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
{…}
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Mixed media installation. Pastel, dirt, lead pencil on linen and wall. 

In a world built of matter, nothing exists separately or completely isolated. Our bodies do not exist separately either. We are an array of bodies, inhabiting and inhabited. And only through our intra-actions the active properties of all participants become empowered. It is one of the peculiarities of our existence, to make distinctions between us, and things. Nevertheless, if we could only try to abolish the binary, oppositional, dichotomous approach in our intra-existence and move towards a more horizontal self-positioning, we would approach a new sensibility and responsibility. We have to acknowledge the affectiveness and agency of actors of all scales in order to feel responsibility and engagement. Therefore, we should sense the material constellation of our bodies, the open and colonized nature of it.