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Entrée
Markeveien 4b
5012 Bergen, Norway
Thursday 12-5pm
Friday 12-5pm
Saturday 12-5pm
Sunday 12-5pm
entree.randi@gmail.com
Newsletter



Sveinung Rudjord Unneland
NA


-


Entrée Cinema 
x
Liu Yujia, Ji Jia
Cinemateket in Bergen
March 14th at 6pm!


-


T-Yard Residency
w/ Eric Otieno Sumba

Writer in Residency




Past Projects  
— 2023


Tanya Busse
Wind Sings to Wire




Louise Sidelmann
Loss



T-Yard Residency
w/ Isabel Baboun Garib

Writer in Residency



Flex Point w/ Northing Space
Naeun Kang, Lydia Soo Jin Park, Tansiyu Chen, Dominique Nachi, Kaho Suzuki, Kuan-Cheng Yeh, Lexy Liangzi Xiao, Jia Ji, Carmilly Yeung, Su Liao, Yun Hao


Kim Hankyul
( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°)


 
Entrée Cinema
Marthe Thorshaug,
Esteban Rivera
, curated by Tatiana Lozano



Kunstbokhandel Under Press
- Kristen Keegan
- Kurt Johannessen

How Artists’ Books Live, by Heather Jones
Bjørn Mortensen 
Ciara Phillips
Mari Kanstad Johnsen
- David Horvitz

Mari Kvien Brunvoll & Elida Brenna Linge
Lars Korff Lofthus


Emily Weiner
I took my lyre and said



Past Projects  
— 2022

Cato Løland
Turning Strangers Into Family



T-Yard Residency
w/ Yara Nakahanda Monteiro Writer in Residency



T-Yard Residency
w/ Kalaf Epalanga
Writer in Residency



Andrea Spreafico
Poor Dictionary (from Distance to Rage)


Cato Løland
Chests
Paris Internationale



Marco Bruzzone
GLUB CLUB (An Underwater Turmoil)



Lera Sxemka
Artists in Residency
 


Nastya Feschuk
Artist in Residency
 


Tuda Muda,
Sigrún Hlín Sigurðardóttir,
Unn Devik
Artists in Residency



Ivana Králíková
Future City Earth Systems
Artists in Residency


T-Yard Writers Residency
︎ www.t-yard.com


Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen
Eyes as Big as Plates


Entrée Cinema
Lasse Årikstad
Bergen Filmklubb


Pamflett & BABF
Bergen Art Book Library


Magnhild Øen Nordahl
Oppløyste abstraksjonar



Past Exhibitions
— 2021


SIGLA BINDA
- a group exhibition



Entrée Cinema
Calderón & Piñeros
Paul Tunge &
Egil Håskjold Larsen
Cinemateket i Bergen



Kåre Aleksander Grundvåg
Grunnarbeid



B3IG3
REACTION VIDEOS
Dan Brown Brønlund
Magnus Håland Sunde
Linda Morell



Lisa Seebach
I’d Rather Be Rehearsing the Future



Entrée Cinema:
Ina Porselius
Bergen Filmklubb



Ann Iren Buan
Falm varsomt, hold om oss



Sjur Eide Aas
At Hermit Street Metro Entrance



Entrée Cinema:
Esteban Rivera,
Marthe Thorshaug
Cinemateket Bergen



Karin Blomgren
Summen av alle krefter


Entrée Cinema: 
Jon Rafman,
Claudia Maté
at Bergen Filmklubb


Past Exhibitions
— 2020



Lin Wang
Exotic Dreams Tattoo Shop



Unfolding Questions, Codes,
and Contours

at Tromsø Kunstforening


Ida Wieth
wander / wonder



Lilian Nabulime, Bathsheba Okwenje,
Miriam Watsemba, Maria Brinch.
My Mother Is Forgetting My Face.
Curated by Martha Kazungu



Ian Giles
After BUTT
at Kunstnerforbundet


Oliver Ressler
Carbon and Captivity


Sara Wolfert
Head Channel & Lion 
- Waking of the Sleeping Lion Ear



Entrée Cinema
Kjersti Vetterstad
A Beehive in My Heart
at Cinemateket Bergen


Halldis Rønning
Watermusic



Past Exhibitions
— 2019



Kristin Austreid
Et underlig redskap

Bergen Assembly
Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead

Anne de Boer, Eloïse Bonneviot
the Mycological Twist

Kamilla Langeland
Stories of the Mind
(Transitioning Into Uncertainty)


Maria Brinch
INYA LAKE

— at Kunstnernes Hus


Bathsheba Okwenje
Freedom of Movement
at  Kunstnernes Hus

Lina Viste Grønli
Nye skulpturer


Toril Johannessen
SKOGSAKEN (The Forest Case)

Marysia Lewandowska
It’s About Time

(in Venice Biennial)

Films by
Mai Hofstad Gunnes


Isme Film
Collectively Conscious Remembrance


Trond Lossius
Jeremy Welsh
The Atmospherics
River deep, mountain high



Exhibitions 
— 2018



Marjolijn Dijkman
Toril Johannessen
Reclaiming Vision

Damir Avdagic
Reenactment/Process
Reprise/Response


Eivind Egeland
Father of Evil

Marysia Lewandowska
Rehearsing the Museum


Anton Vidokle
Immortality for All: a film trilogy on
Russian Cosmism

Curated by
Ingrid Haug Erstad

Johanna Billing
Pulheim Jam Session,
I’m Gonna Live Anyhow Until I die,
I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm,
This is How We Walk on the Moon,
Magical World


Jenine Marsh
Kneading Wheel, 
Coins and Tokens

Jenine Marsh
Sofia Eliasson
Lasse Årikstad
Johanna Lettmayer
Lewis & Taggar
Jon Benjamin Tallerås
Orientering 
—  a group show in public space


Jon Rafman
Dream Journal
2016-2017


Goutam Ghosh &
Jason Havneraas
PAARA

Ian Giles
After BUTT

Films by Yafei Qi
Wearing The Fog, 
I Wonder Why, 
Life Tells Lies

Exhibitions
— 2017

Daniel Gustav Cramer
Five Days

Kamilla Langeland
Sjur Eide Aas
The Thinker, Flower Pot and Mush

Danilo Correale
Equivalent Unit
Reverie: On the Liberation from Work


Valentin Manz
Useful Junk

Jeannine Han
Dan Riley
Time Flies When Slipping
Counter-Clockwise


Pedro Gómez-Egaña
Pleasure

Ane Graff
Mattering Waves


Andrew Amorim
Lest We Perish

Tom S. Kosmo
Unnatural Selection

Jenine Marsh
Lindsay Lawson

Dear Stranger


Exhibitions
— 2016


ALBUM
Eline Mugaas
Elise Storsveen
How to Feel Like a Woman

DKUK (Daniel Kelly)
Presents: Jóhanna Ellen
Digital Retreat Dot Com

Cato Løland
Folded Lines, Battles and Events

Harald Beharie
Louis Schou-Hansen
(S)kjønn safari 2.0

Lynda Benglis
On Screen
Bergen Assembly

Linn Pedersen
Bjørn Mortensen
Terence Koh
NADA New York

Ida Nissen
Kamilla Langeland
Marthe Elise Stramrud
Christian Tunge
Eivind Egeland
Fading Forms

Anders Holen
Stimulus

Sinta Werner
Vanishing Lines

Exhibitions
— 2015


Bjørn Mortensen
Pouches and Pockets
/ Compositories in Color


Linn Pedersen
Plain Air

Øystein Klakegg
Entrée # 55

Leander Djønne
Petroglyphs of the Indebted Man

Lewis & Taggart
Black Holes and other painted objects


Azar Alsharif
Bjørn Mortensen
Steinar Haga Kristensen
Lewis & Taggart
Vilde Salhus Røed
Heidi Bjørgan
NADA New York

Linda Sormin
Heidi Bjørgan
Collision

Steinar Haga Kristensen
The Fundamental Part of Any Act

Exhibitions
—2014


Tora Endestad Bjørkheim
Bjørn-Henrik Lybeck


Mathijs van Geest
The passenger eclipsed
the object that I could have
seen otherwise


Marit Følstad
Sense of Doubt

Oliver Laric
Yuanmingyuan3D

Terence Koh
sticks, stones and bones 

Kristin Tårnesvik
Espen Sommer Eide
Korsmos ugressarkiv

Exhibitions
— 2013


André Tehrani
Lost Allusions


Pedro Gómez-Egaña
Object to be Destroyed


Flag New York City

Christian von Borries
I’m M
Institute of Political Hallucinations
Bergen Assembly

Dillan Marsh
June Twenty-First

Vilde Salhus Røed
For the Sake of Colour


Azar Alsharif
The distant things seem close (…)
the close remote (…) the air is loaded


Magnhild Øen Nordahl
Omar Johnsen
Trialog

Lars Korff Lofthus
New Work

Exhibitions
— 2012


Anngjerd Rustan
The Dust Will Roll Together

Cato Løland
Oliver Pietsch
Love is Old, Love is New

Stian Ådlandsvik
Abstract Simplicity of Need

Sinta Werner
Something that stands for
Something / Double
Described Tautologies


Kjersti Vetterstad
Lethargia

Anna Lundh
Grey Zone

Arne Rygg
Borghild Rudjord Unneland
Lisa Him-Jensen
Cato Løland
Lewis & Taggart
Klara Sofie Ludvigsen
Magnhild Øen Nordahl
Mathijs van Geest
Andrea Spreafico
Flag Bergen

Exhibitions
— 2011


Karen Skog & Mia Øquist
Skog & Øquist systematiserer

Danilo Correale
We Are Making History

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland
U.T.

Ethan Hayes-Chute
Make/Shifted Cabin

Ebba Bohlin
Per-Oskar Leu
Kaia Hugin
Pica Pica

Gabriel Kvendseth
First We Take Mannahatta

Roger von Reybekiel
Do Everything Fantastic

Exhibitions
— 2010



Michael Johansson
27m3

Tone Wolff Kalstad
This Color Is Everywhere


Knud Young Lunde
Road Show Event Plan


Alison Carey
Ivan Twohig
Benjamin Gaulon
On The In-Between


Mercedes Mühleisen
Øyvind Aspen
Birk Bjørlo
Damir Avdagic
Annette Stav Johanssen
If Everything Else Fails...

Mart
Ciara Scanlan
Matthew Nevin
An Instructional

Patrick Wagner
Nina Nowak
Samuel Seger Patricia Wagner
South of No North

Gandt
Agnes Nedregaard Midskills
Patrick Coyle
Boogey Boys Santiago Mostyn
Bergen Biennale 2010 by Ytter

Lars Korff Lofthus
West Norwegian Pavilion


Serina Erfjord
Repeat


Mattias Arvastsson
Presence No.5


Malin Lennström-Örtwall
It`s like Nothing Ever Happened

Exhibitions
— 2009


Tor Navjord
FM/AM

Ragnhild Johansen
Erased Knot Painting


Entrée Radio


Lewis and Taggart
Ledsagende lydspor


In Conversation:
Gómez-Egaña and
Mathijs van Geest


In Conversation:
Andrew Amorim and
Mitch Speed


In Conversation:
Ane Graff and Alex Klein


In Conversation:
Martin Clark and Daniel Kelly


Ludo Sounds with
Tori Wrånes




In Conversation:
Stine Janvin Motland,
Kusum Normoyle,
Mette Rasmussen,
Cara Stewart



Randi Grov Berger
Contact/Info/CV
Other projects







Mark
November 15th — December 22nd, 2019


Kristin Austreid

Et underlig redskap


Exhibition opening:
Friday November 15th, 6— 9pm




 

Kristin Austreid, Duo XIII (2019), oil on panel. All photos by Thor Brødreskift



Jeg holder et underlig redskap i hånden. Å beskrive det ville ta all tilgjengelig tid. Dets utstrekning – men jeg vet ikke engang hva utstrekning er. Materialet det er laget av, forekommer meg gudelignende. Gudelignende? Jeg har aldri sett Gud. Hvordan skulle noe ligne Gud? I et visst lys (nedadgående sol, svart røyk fra bålene) ser det ut som en del av hånden.
        Hvilket formål er det laget for? De fleste redskaper er utformet med tanke på én, høyst to, helt spesifikke handlinger. Bøte et garn, stikke hull i et lærbelte. Formålet lar seg utlede av formen. Ikke slik med dette. Er det i det hele tatt et redskap?
        Jeg kunne slå et menneske i hjel med det, jeg kunne også kjærtegne noen, om noen kom forbi som lot seg kjærtegne.

...

Hvor mange før meg har sammenlignet månen med en sølvmynt? Med en sigd? Med en sitron? Hvor mange før meg har beskrevet mørke som en kappe? Dagligdagse gjenstander: frukt, himmellegemer, verktøy. Men jeg blir aldri fortrolig med dem. I smug stirrer jeg på tingene som en forrykt, mistenksom, nesten hatefull. Jeg begriper dem ikke. Selv når jeg holder dem i hånden. 

(Ingvild Burkey, 2017)


Entrée er stolte av å presentere en separatutstilling med Kristin Austreid. I en serie nye malerier er forskjellige gjenstander og overflater satt sammen til surrealistiske komposisjoner av overlappende lag. Her er et forhistorisk steinredskap plassert side om side med en nedslitt pinne. Gjennom åpningen i en pyntepute fra et museumslager, ser vi rett på en skitten vindusrute opplyst av blitsen fra et fotoapparat. Ulike perspektiv og synsvinkler er stilt opp mot hverandre, også i ett og samme bilde. Mellom maleriene etableres kuriøse forbindelser som nettopp gjennom det uventede kan åpne for refleksjon, både rundt hva det vil si å betrakte noe og rundt maleriets språk. Maleriene heller mot det fotorealistiske, samtidig er formale og abstrakte kvaliteter gitt et tydelig fokus. Bagatellmessige spor og flekker, baksider eller overflater vi vanligvis dekker over er studert på nært hold, og sammen med det grunne perspektivet virker også maleriets fysiske flate nærværende. Fokuset på detaljer vitner om en langsom prosess der representasjon i maleriet og tingenes flertydighet er veid opp mot hverandre; forholdet mellom det flate og det romlige, nærhet og avstand, mellom det å se på og det å se inn i. I forlengelsen av dette oppstår mer intime møter, hvor mening og ubetydelighet ikke alltid lar seg skille.


Kristin Austreid (f.1985, Haugesund) bor og arbeider i Bergen. Hun har en mastergrad fra Kunst- og designhøgskolen i Bergen (2014). Austreids arbeider er både fotorealistiske og abstrakte, alltid konsentrert om grunnleggende emner som komposisjon, farge og form. Interessen for optikk, persepsjon og betraktning går igjen i arbeidene. I tillegg til flere separatutstillinger og gruppeutstillinger i Norge, blant annet på Galleri LNM, Kunstnerforbundet, Agder Kunstsenter, Bergen Kjøtt og Høstutstillingen, er hun innkjøpt av Oslo kommune, Equinors Kunstsamling, Haugesund Billedgalleri og The City of Burgdorf i Sveits. I 2016 mottok hun The P:I:G Prize fra The P:I:G Foundation v/Henrik Vibskov. Hun har deltatt på AiR ved blant annet Circolo Scandinavo, Roma (ITA), Gallery Svalbard, Longyearbyen (NO) og Die Fabrik, Burgdorf (CHE).


Velkommen til utstillingsåpning på fredag kl. 18!
Åpningstider ved Entrée (frem til 22. desember) er tors - søn, kl. 12-16.



Presse
29.11.2019
Kunstkritikk

Lige før migrænen
Av Susanne Christensen

29.12.2019
Kristin Austreid at Entrée
ArtViewer


// English//



Entrée is proud to present a solo exhibition with Kristin Austreid. In her new series of paintings, different objects and surfaces are put together in surreal compositions of overlapping layers. A prehistoric tool is placed next to a dilapidated stick. Through the back of a decorative pillow from a museum warehouse, we look straight at a dirty windowpane illuminated by the flash from a camera. Different perspectives and viewpoints are set up against each other, even in one and the same image. Curious connections are established between the paintings, which, through the unexpected motivates reflection, concerning the act of looking itself and the language of painting. The paintings lean towards the photorealistic, at the same time, formal and abstract qualities are given a clear focus. Trivialities like stains and traces, backsides or surfaces we usually disguise, are studied up close, and along with the shallow perspective, the physical surface of the painting seem present. The focus on details indicates a slow process where representation in painting and the ambiguity of things are measured against each other; the relationship between the flat and the spatial, proximity and distance, between looking at and looking into. As a result of this, more intimate encounters occur, where meaning and insignificance are not easily separated.


Kristin Austreid (b.1985, Haugesund) lives and works in Bergen. She holds a master's degree from Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2014). Austreid's work is both photorealistic and abstract, always concentrated on basic topics such as composition, color and shape. Her interest in optics, perception and the observing gaze are returning themes in her work. In addition to several solo- and group exhibitions in Norway, including at Galleri LNM, Kunstnerforbundet, Agder Kunstsenter, Bergen Kjøtt and Høstutstillingen, her work has been included in the collections of Oslo Municipality, Equinor’s Art Collection, Haugesund Billedgalleri and The City of Burgdorf in Switzerland. In 2016 she received The P: I: G Prize from The P: I: G Foundation v / Henrik Vibskov. She has participated in AiRs at, among others, Circolo Scandinavo, Rome (ITA), Gallery Svalbard, Longyearbyen (NO) and Die Fabrik, Burgdorf (CHE).

Welcome to the exhibition opening this Friday at 6pm!
Opening hours at Entrée (until December 22nd) is Thur - Sun, noon-4pm.




Duo XII
66,5 x 47,3 cm

Duo X
48 x 34 cm


Splitt
80 x 56 cm




Duo XI
48 x 34 cm


Mono III
42 x 30 cm



Mono IV
100 x 67 cm


Dear Kristin,

I’ve repeatedly returned to rewriting a suitable apology. My delayed response is not at all down to confusion because you didn’t “narrow things down.” In fact, it is this staying with ambivalence, being surrounded by an ambience of possibility (such “cruel optimism”!) that strikes me most in the images you sent me. I’ve been trying to think through this a little more. My hope has been that, as a dedication by other means, my gesture of apology would catalyse all my thoughts you’re about to read, putting them into a constellation parallel to that of your work. The demands of propriety, however they’ve seeped in, have left me with a gesture born of ballooning aspiration.

What I think I need to remember is that the temptation to scowl at the arrogance and delusion driving such aspiration (did I really think I could pull this off?) would be to ignore the social environment in which the pressure causing the “balloon” to inflate propagates: all the cultural forms saturated with heroic figures and an ethos of (self-) improvement (the underbelly of which is depression). You see, when oriented to the past, faced with its enormity, such future-oriented aspiration—to cover the whole ground, render everything perfectly, and give a full account—can turn into an ethics of arrogant retrospection in which the passing of time apparently gifts a heroic sense of purpose and of being on the frontier—a gift the dead did not and cannot have (as Walter Benjamin warned: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.”)

Why is the socialization of this psychological dynamic important to bring up here? You see, I think it is an aspect of an approach to the past your recent work resists by turning what I consider to be your previous explorations of ambience and intimacy—how an ambience binds psychological and physical space—towards a meditation on relations to the past.

When conversing, we’ve often returned to notions of ambience, without really developing what we meant. With their drapery and aspects of arrangement and display, your work from the last couple of years seems to be more directly focused in its evocation of a specific ambience that might be best summed up by the title of an interview Tor Ulven did with Vagant magazine in 1993 (apparently, the only interview he ever did): “A language that glows, but pretends to lie under cold, heat-resistant glass” [Et språk som gløder, men later som det ligger under kalt, ildfast glass]. There’s a hallucinatory intensity to this work, varying with the specificities of lighting in each image, even if the scenes feel bounded and the spacing of the encounter fairly uniform. The latter, thought more ambiently in terms of affect rather than distance, is varied substantially in the new work you sent me images of (e.g. Duo X). The aspects of arrangement and display have been submerged, yet the still starkly lit, cloistered spaces now more clearly imply a surrounding capaciousness—life outside the image—by way of blur, shadow, reflection, and fissure, in addition to the sense that the images now feel varyingly cropped or magnified. In doing this, your work also drifts further from the trappings of the still-life scene in which symbolism is infiltrated by the showcasing of merchandise (as per the desires of a patron, perhaps). Strangely, you and I have never really spoken about historical examples of still life images.

What strikes me as most applicable now is the possibility to get a sense of the power of objects through the lens of a particular period and place by considering the collection of objects showcased in still lifes. This empowerment of objects (in addition to the owner’s flaunting of his or her wealth and taste) is something we can trace through the word “fetish” to the high period of still-life painting that also coincided with the violently exploitative economics of colonialism. Seventeenth century Dutch still lifes mark the modern fetishisation of commodities right at the time when Dutch merchants were experiencing the feeling of economic and colonial power in their extraction of fetish objects and people-objects (slaves) from communities on the coasts of Africa—as if the turning of people into commodities abroad enabled the personification of things at home. As slaves became expendable, this regime of objects was naturalised, giving a sickening tinge to the French and Italian terms for “still life”—natures mortes and natura morta (“dead nature”). The still life is perhaps, then, a memorial to this extraction and conferment of life from slave to object, its ambivalent “stillness” evincing the cancelling out of muffled screams by charmed murmur. Maybe all still life is also a vanitas or memento mori of expendable, exploited life, rather than a gentle, ornamental reminder of life’s privilege and privileged living? (I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this given your selection of objects to paint) It should also not be forgotten that painting technique was radically developed in this period: the whimsical exercise of power over nature and people also involved an instrumentalisation of the artist who was tasked with the technical challenge of trying to animate innocuous objects with the tenderness of portraiture (I remember you also saying that you almost feel like you’re attending to human bodies when working).

Whilst the social dynamics in question have of course altered, if we were to maintain that still lifes are indicators of social values and the power of objects, your work would suggest that the abstraction of commodification is moving towards ambiences and atmospheres (something aligning with the movement of business strategies to a focus on “the experience economy”). Yet, as I alluded to above, simultaneously to “focusing” on ambience, your work mutes the previous grandeur of merchandise display by presenting objects such as scratched plates of glass (Duo XII) or, even, parts of unidentifiable things (Duo XIII).

Briefly returning to a aspects of proximity, a tactic some of your most recent work takes up is to bring us close to a specific part of something, or so close it’s difficult to see what the “something” I’m confronted with is. Still lifes are typically tilted displays, as if they were falling out the image; in your work I almost feel like I’m impinging on the compositions, keeping the objects together, pressing on their “front” (the “heat-resistant glass”?). However, this sense of closeness, this opportunity for scrutiny, is filtered through the work’s particular optics in which blur, depth of field, reflection, and shadow imply surroundings in which affective attunement to ambience seems more useful than knowing what it is I’m looking at. Closeness and proximity seem like blunt tools when considering your work.

I’m reminded of the intriguing conversation we had about the challenge of painting something with little visual information—so important when your work’s ambience resonates out from nuances of blur and depth of field. I think we agreed that gesture becomes vital: How to imply information that is ungraspable/imperceptible, whilst keeping a mark, a stroke, “alive” (as you put it)? Blur, then, as focus’s structural necessity, becomes the catalyst for a gestural attentiveness. In this sense, you’ve channelled the aforementioned technical achievements of fetishistic object animation in seventeenth century still life painting towards the blur that follows us around, as if looking to address the violence that propelled the previous technical developments.

I’m tempted to say that the work invites hallucination or nausea (remembering the latter’s relationship to noise), but its uneasiness might be better thought of as ambivalence (“ambi-“ denoting “around” or “surround”), an ambivalence of the alluring but nauseating intensity and the oblique implication of a surround outside the frame of the image—being drawn in and shown away simultaneously. When writing of looking at objects, Ingvild Burkey gets at this in a line from the excerpt you sent me: “In secret I stare at things like someone possessed, suspicious, almost hateful” [I smug stirrer jeg på tingene som en forrykt, mistenksom, nesten hatefull]. The ambivalence in your work is troubled and complicated, however, by the fissures and scarring of Mono III andMono IV, which emphasise the objecthood of the images, offering a way out of the woozy allure of the image. In addition to the introduction of a new “subject” in your work I didn’t previously cite above—namely, images from archives—, this emphasised objecthood invites a consideration of how ambience might offer a perspective on the past, something I only find present in your most recent work.

When viewing the gathered objects of still lifes, we might approach them like Walter Benjamin approached collecting: in terms of their fate. Having kept hardcopies of the images you sent in my wallet, inadvertent glances felt like I kept stumbling upon a set of forgotten instant-camerapictures, or old documentation of a crime-scene. Feeling almost like found objects, the imagery of Mono III and Mono IV breaks the other work and opens my imagination to temporal leaps: These images were important for something, for someone. How did they get here? What might they be, or have been, part of? What does their apparentness in the present speak of or to? An acoustic analog of your work’s optics would perhaps be to think of a listening to the past that listens to the reverberation of sounds—their (non-) spaces—rather than to their obviously “musical” elements.

Such a sensitivity would practice Benjamin’s reading of history “against the grain”, understanding the writing of history as also the violent but unavoidable circumscription of the past: writing out, writing over, and misquoting (and mishearing) in order to tell a story whilst always, also working in a larger field of storytelling. This is not merely a melancholic lamentation. Narratives in films, books, and imagery shape how we can relate for the past, bringing with it aspirational and affective norms, a dreamworld and sensitivity.

Your work’s engagement with ambience offers some resistance to conditions of aspiration in which we are offered heroic cultural figures and characters to identify with—and identify us—, powering principles of what it means to “get on (in life)” and, even, “have a life”, excavating a falling sea floor as water levels rise. Tragedies don’t need heroes (“coward” or “villain” as the dictionary-suggested antonyms of “hero” indicates the latter’s cultural entrenchment as “good”). The tragedy of ambience is born of a storytelling’s necessary omissions, passersby, and witnesses. Ubiquity and obliquity make up this falling-away others might call hope or potential. In this sense, silence promises meaning and bears trauma (we can perhaps think of the “little visual information” of blur here too)—the appearance of a thing and not many.

Of course, I’ve been thinking again of your desire to make yourself “more stupid than the work”. It’s a comment I have much sympathy for and, whilst it’s possible to relate it to a Surrealist enamour with the unconscious, I hear at this moment more in terms of a humbling of aspiration (although wanting to feel stupid might be because of a specific aspiration?). This process of stupefying, as you work to bind and meld what you think of as the “floating” objects in the photographs you take, is also, you said, to distance yourself—a strategy most often spoken of in terms of “getting an oversight” or “better sense” of some work, stepping back to “see the bigger picture.” In your work, I come close to see an implication of something similar, obliquely via the ambience shaped by way of the blur, shadow, and reflection of your work’s optics. As in your work process, distance does not yield knowledge in an encounter with your work, but neither does coming close feel intimate.

I remember writing to you after first spending some time with the work you presented in Oslo last year, stating that it was helping me think through aspects of sonic media technologies and intimacy I was confusing myself with at the time. Seeing your most recent work, I would say that how media technologies alter and differently produce feelings of space (and time)—as access and reach, we might say—is even more evident to me now. A particular aspect of this is that proximity and the “personal” are abstractions operative en masse in media technologies; “aura” is something else now. I find your work particularly instructive here in that it seems to perform the particular quality of spatial contraction and proximate anonymity of media technologies Sherry Turkle has wryly quipped gives a sense of “being alone together.”

Your work’s particular optics and ambivalent sense of spacing influenced by media technologies, how these suggest an attunement to ambience we could think of as both an orientation towards an a-heroic historiography and an indicator of contemporary forms of commodification, offers me a great deal when reflecting on the politics of contemporary image-making. There I go making it sound a bit heroic…

All my best,
Johnny

(Letter to Kristin Austreid, from Johnny Herbert, 15.11.2019)

Johnny Herbert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, London, having previously studied music composition and art in the U.K. and Norway. He is co-founding editor of Grafters’ Quarterly, a free newspaper publication series, and works as a writer and copyeditor. He is based in Oslo.


Mark