Forestill deg at du faller

Oslo Kunstforening is pleased to welcome you to the first exhibition opening of the year on 29 January, 18–20. The group exhibition Forestill deg at du faller [Imagine You Are Falling] presents new works by Per Christian Brown, Book & Hedén, Hege Nyborg, Helene Sommer, and Thorbjørn Sørensen.

Over the past decade, the artists have established a shared platform for conversations, discussions, and exhibitions. All are recognized figures on the Norwegian art scene, yet they come from different generations and work across a wide range of media and artistic expressions. Despite these differences, they have met regularly over the years through a shared interest in art, theory, nature, and literature.

In the exhibition, the artists take as their point of departure the inherent histories of things – their use and biography. The dense and complex relationships between objects and their surroundings are manifested in individual works consisting of painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. The object can be understood as existing somewhere between nature and culture, as a materialization of the past in the present. The group states:

We are interested in how objects exist in relation to, and on equal terms with, humans, plants, and animals. How do objects convey time, and is their apparent immobility merely a reflection of our limited perspective? In our respective works, we explore these themes from different angles – from the voices of objects in the home and how they encapsulate memories, to the margins of objects and objects as historical entities; the order, physiology, and systematization of things; and the sorting and archiving of the objects we leave behind.

The exhibition title references the artist Hito Steyerl’s essay In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective(e-flux Journal, 2011), in which she analyzes the shift from classical linear perspective to the vertical perspective of drones and satellites. Steyerl describes how this shift entails a free fall toward the unknown, with no firm ground beneath us and no sky above us: “Falling means ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe. Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condition that turns people into things and vice versa.”

The group asks whether the objects that surround us might nonetheless be what keeps us grounded.

Per Christian Brown’s Det som var, det som er, og det som kommer: fortellinger fra en bygård i Berlin [What was, what is, and what is to come: stories from an apartment building in Berlin] is a video- and photo-based documentary work about the lives of the residents of the apartment building where he himself has lived for the past 20 years. Through portraits and interviews, the building is depicted as a living archive, in which both people and the objects surrounding them carry memories of everyday life as well as major historical upheavals.

In the work of the duo Book & Hedén, we are invited into an old storage space where artworks have been kept for many years, covered in dust and forgotten. The installation Lageret, Arvegodset, Muren [The Storage, the Heirlooms, the Wall] shows in different ways how art produced over the course of a long artistic life may have to be discarded, but also how inherited belongings – seemingly worthless, everyday objects that one has not chosen to own – are nevertheless kept and serve as the starting point for new artworks.

Hege Nyborg’s work 13 stasjoner for det anakrone objektet [13 Stations for the anachronic object] consists of text, photography, everyday objects, organic material, and minerals, spanning a historical range from the present day back to the Earth’s Jurassic period. Through references to science, literature, and science fiction, she investigates how speculative knowledge and established models of understanding can be combined in new ways.

In Helene Sommer’s video essay Undergrunnsbevegelser [Subterranean movements], the interior of the Earth is opened up as an archive of time, memories, and movement. Using the drill core as a point of departure – a vertical cross-section through layers of stone, history, and millions of years – the work explores the relationship between humans, science, and the ground beneath our feet.

Thorbjørn Sørensen presents a series of new paintings dedicated to things – a cup, an outdated telephone, a pair of worn shoes. These are trivial yet necessary things; things with high emotional or symbolic value, or things that simply irritate and lodge themselves in our consciousness. Underpinning the works is a belief in the power of things and their capacity to intervene in our lives.