ELECTRIFICATION, RIPPLES and A GLASS PLATE

The exhibition Electrification, Ripples, and a Glass Plate reflects upon locational documentarian practices through photography and sound to investigate visible and invisible matters. The show spans more than a hundred years of photography history, bringing together intergenerational artists whose art has links to the region of Finnmark and territories in Northern Norway/Sápmi, where nation-state borders and the ruling of Russia, Europe, and the Arctic are both abstract, visible, and invisible depending on the point of observation.

“Electrification, Ripples, and a Glass Plate” presents photographic works by Bente Geving, Anne Lindgaard Møller, Morten Torgersrud and Ellisif Wessel and sounds, video recordings, drawings and photos by the Academy of Rhythmorphology (ARm) with contributions from Marielle van Dop, Miriam Jakob, Peeter Laurits, Margrethe Pettersen, Ina Otzko, Sakib Saboor, Torgeir Vassvik, Izabela Żółcińska, Marte Aas, Arjen Mulder and Signe Lidén.

Part of the artworks in the exhibition can be perceived as a continuation of the landscape tradition. However, they offer an artistic, concrete, indirect, informative, and metaphorical contribution to the place of ecology today concerning the climate crisis we are facing. Instead of looking for exhaustive conclusions, the exhibition intends to be open and suggestive on one end and exemplifying and informative on the other.

Through Signe Lidén instruments, we hear sea urchins, elbow shells, and other life in rhythmic synchronization in a tidal pond, and one can register the tidal wave’s roar through the region’s highest mountains. What is rhythm when mirrored from sound to photography? What connections does the photograph record?

Similarly to Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression, Ellisif Wessel documented extensively the precarious living conditions of the local population at the beginning of the 1900s and until her passing. In 1902, she photographed the sun, the moon, rivers, and fjords in the border areas of Eastern Finnmark. Wild rapids in the Pasvik River were her motifs. These rivers have been transformed into hydropower sources that may indirectly power our photocameras.

Morten Torgersrud’s work, interested in Wessel, points out the prerequisites of photography: how does it move, what does it need, and how it is engraved in the same areas explored by Wessel, including in rivers today.

Bente Geving’s photo series from Sør-Varanger shows people’s movements in this landscape through youthful energy and devices in 1990, the historical moment of the collapse of the Communist Block, and the reclaim of Sámi pride through restorative legislation.

Anne Lindgaard Møller has collaborated with people in specific contexts, including Alta, famously known for environmental and indigenous concerns in the 1970s. She asks people in their homes to become instruments to record the sunlight’s production of images through the day’s changing light/dark cycle.

In addition to the individual art works the exhibition is also interspersed with the ongoing work, workshops, and productions of the Academy for Rhythmorphology, where several practices come together to study how rhythms connect and break, swing and create form, and how they influence forms of life.