A Sense of a Beginning
Munan Øvrelid 2011.
HD-video, 13 min, black and white.
Text excerpts from Schiller`s On Naive and Sentimental Poetry as subtitles.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Monday, November 22, 2010
An encounter like a flash, from now to the end of consciousness
2010, Installation, concrete, furniture, video
In the main space of the gallery one is confronted with the installation An encounter like a flash, from now to the end of consciousness (2010), which is composed of a video projection, a sculpture and two concrete slabs. Like a monument each monolithic slab stands vertically, in a frontal position. Bold, expressive lines reminiscent of early modernist abstract painting grace their façades; the marking is deep and forceful, as though chiseled out by hand or delivered by a violent blow. In the nearby video, what looks like a courtyard of a parliamentary building in the midst of an upheaval is set ablaze. Cameras flash and figures lurking behind the windows discard unidentifiable objects, which fall mercilessly and crash to the ground; the scene fades to black. The subsequent scenes follow a similar structure in different settings, as other objects such as computer monitors, papers and furniture topple down from windows. The footage is hand-held, choppy, pixilated, taken from the Internet. The sources are anonymous, the culprits behind these acts are unknown, even the falling objects are hardly distinguishable. In short, these clips have a bareness about them. One cannot attribute any content or motivation to them, they simply happen, and here they happen in super slow-motion. This spontaneous act is made to linger, it has duration, sometimes the objects seem weightless, still, unresponsive. Eventually however, they all respond to gravity, and as they fall, the wind and other countering forces cause them to spin, float, accelerate downwards. The installation also includes a more tangible version of this spectacle, as a chair and computer lie crushed under an office cabinet. These objects look damaged, battered, smeared by a crusty beige substance; they have also crashed down, the imprints of their unique shapes preserved on the faces of the concrete slabs. It now becomes evident that these marks were not the result of fine craftsmanship, but the result of chance, rendered not by hand, but by an authorless object. In this installation one feels a kind of inevitability of the fall, of the overpowering force of gravity, which leads to the encounter with the impassable, unconquerable ground, what Georges Bataille called “base matter,” a substance always external and foreign to “human aspirations”, irreducible to “the great ontological machines.”[i]
One may suggest that monuments in themselves are also a kind of base materiality, a kind of moldable stuff that mark out history, geography, and also the geography of history. However, every monument is also a summarization. Through its imagery, or through a few concise words on an accompanying plaque it establishes a simple, digestible, durable truth. Yet, a monument is not only a snapshot of a complex of events, a monument also re-maps history, restages it, allows a story to be told, provides a language from which to embark on to the truth. For to convey what really happened is not a simple matter, one may need to adopt unorthodox measures, start from incoherent narratives. As Jacques Rancière writes, one may need to look at “different types of traces (interviews, significant faces, archival documents, extracts from documentary and fictional films, etc) in order to suggest possibilities for thinking [a] story or history. The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.”[ii] Perhaps in Øvrelid’s work these monolithic structures are not meant to open up histories, or unearth important truths, for their history is blatantly obvious, it has not blossomed yet, has not become a truth. They are the transparent real that must be fictionalized. They are themselves a kind of a raw canvas, but unlike the non-representational gestures of high modernism, the marks on their surface are purely representational, completely staged, staging the act of violence, seemingly acts of desperation.
[i] Georges Bataille, trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press: (Minneapolis, 1985), p. 52.
[ii] Jacques Rancière, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum: (New York, 2004), p. 38.
Like a cat around the hot milk
2010, video, 4 min
An animated, anthropomorphized cat delivers a speech calling for revolutionary action in which he recites Franz Kafka’s short story The Silence of the Sirens. In this story Ulysses sails through the seas, anticipating a confrontation with the sirens, whose singing have led many to their demise. In order to protect himself against the deadly sound, he chains himself to the mast and puts wax in his ears, though such measures are widely known to be insufficient. Amazingly, he survives. Kafka proposes that either the sirens believed that their silence was a sufficient weapon, or that, transfixed by his distant gaze, they forget to sing. But the sirens’ silence much like the silence in this exhibition can be heard because one listens, expecting sound, a voice, a resounding voice to sail through the space. Silence here, is not the absence of sound, but a hollow resonance which requires an especially sensitive ear, where one must not forget to listen, where one must listen as one must speak.
Wojciech Olejnik
2010, video, 4 min
An animated, anthropomorphized cat delivers a speech calling for revolutionary action in which he recites Franz Kafka’s short story The Silence of the Sirens. In this story Ulysses sails through the seas, anticipating a confrontation with the sirens, whose singing have led many to their demise. In order to protect himself against the deadly sound, he chains himself to the mast and puts wax in his ears, though such measures are widely known to be insufficient. Amazingly, he survives. Kafka proposes that either the sirens believed that their silence was a sufficient weapon, or that, transfixed by his distant gaze, they forget to sing. But the sirens’ silence much like the silence in this exhibition can be heard because one listens, expecting sound, a voice, a resounding voice to sail through the space. Silence here, is not the absence of sound, but a hollow resonance which requires an especially sensitive ear, where one must not forget to listen, where one must listen as one must speak.
Wojciech Olejnik
Friday, March 19, 2010
To lost footholds
8mm til video, 4 min, 2010
8mm til video, 4 min, 2010
The video To Lost Footholds (2010) also investigates the commemoration and representation of violent acts, but also of important historical events of violence. In the video a slowly rotating sculptural reproduction of the universally recognizable “raising the flag on Iwo Jima” emerges out of the darkness. The light flickers feebly, illuminating occasional details, and as the flag pole comes into a fuller view, sparks flare up, revealing the flag pole to be a sparkler, and the sculpture to be a miniature. This realization drastically changes the interpretation of the miniature, its presupposed symbolic authority diminishes as it no longer symbolizes American perseverance and pride. It is now just a figurine, an object. Gradually, close-ups of other sculptures are introduced, each more abstract, more colourful than the last. As the concrete materiality and the epical imagery of war is replaced by a light, majestic bouquet of tissue paper and broken pieces of clear plastic one’s attention may also shift away from the political content of this video. By the end the picture is out of focus, the imagery is soft and vivid, just an array of formless colours and abstract shapes. The move towards abstractness drowns out the symbolic imagery of the video as it destabilizes and depoliticizes the content of the work. However, this very process is countered with a more subtle process of politicization, which relies less on unambiguous political symbolism and relies more on recognizable cues, on a formal language, on various filmic techniques. Such a process allows the viewer to navigate through the video in accordance to one’s own political perspective. This does not mean however, that these cues and techniques are incoherent or completely arbitrary. An example is the obvious reference to the formal language of war documentary films, which is evident in the grainy, scratched, mostly monochromatic character of the footage. This is also apparent in the film’s structure, the use of long and contemplative shots, the many close-ups of neglected nooks, littered with debris, the lighting methods which etch out architectural spaces and human forms from the darkness; all these techniques create a visual language that is typically used for showing the horrors of war or the tensions of political struggle. Halfway through the film a red fabric interrupts the grayness of an architectural assemblage reminiscent of a bombed out wreckage, it appears like a handkerchief, a poppy, perhaps even a banner, a call for change, a call to action.
Wojciech Olejnik
Kilden, video, 10 min, 2010, Munan Øvrelid
The video shows a model of a gallery room with Henry Moore sculptures in.
A scene showing nudists taking a bath in a small lake in a forest is projected into the room.
In front of the room there is a plexi glass sheet, a hand sands the glass so that the projection shows on top of it.
The room disappears and the sculptures seem to be standing in the water.
In the end the nudists move and disappear into the sculptures.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Joan of Arc - Stranded Revelation 2009
Videoinstallation
The video is based on a scene in Karl Dreier`s film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”.
In the scene Joan is sitting in her cell praying for strength, when God comes to her as bird in her open prison window.
In my video I have reconstructed the open cell window from the film. I have built in plexiglas in the window ledge. So that when the bird sits in the window it looks open, but the bird is caught between the two glas sheets and it stays there as if to legitimize Joan`s rebellion.
The suffering mirrored image of Joan of Arc comes and goes in the open window and the viewer is put her position in front of the window.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Apocalypto Days of our great lament
Video 2008, 13 min
The video is filmed in Tikal, Guatemala, where also Apocalypto (2007), a film depicting the mayan society towards its end is filmed.
In my video I have worked with the films representation of the mayan death seremonie and its human sacrifice rituales.
I have refilmed these scenes in the original mayan tempel city Tikal, using the same camera angels and positions as in the film, but without the action.
The temples are empty and only some scathered turists and locals are hiding from the sun.
The pictures are like traces of a vanished culture, and the sound from scenes in Apocalypto, trance like blood orgies, are placed on top.
In my video I have worked with the films representation of the mayan death seremonie and its human sacrifice rituales.
I have refilmed these scenes in the original mayan tempel city Tikal, using the same camera angels and positions as in the film, but without the action.
The temples are empty and only some scathered turists and locals are hiding from the sun.
The pictures are like traces of a vanished culture, and the sound from scenes in Apocalypto, trance like blood orgies, are placed on top.
Surrender
Installation 2007
“Surrender” is a 3m*2m big wall installation consisting of 165 printed still images in a spiral.
The images are from Windows Mediaplayers psychedelic visualisation of the end of Winston Churchills speach from 1942.
“We will fight in the hills and in the valleys and we shall never surrender.”
The images are from Windows Mediaplayers psychedelic visualisation of the end of Winston Churchills speach from 1942.
“We will fight in the hills and in the valleys and we shall never surrender.”
Installation 2006, 8m neon sign, stones, broken windows, curtains
The sign spells out "reality is dead, imagination lives",
but only "RESIGNATION" glows, because the other letters are broken
Inside the museum there are stones and broken glass on the floor, the windows are broken and the curtains are blowing in the wind
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