Nina Strand 8/12/22 Nina Strand 8/12/22

TOM SANDBERG

I am driving his car.

Somewhere, in the midst of those dark Scandinavian woods,

I pull over to the side of the road and make a complete stop.

Afterimage by Morten Andenæs:

I am driving his car.

Somewhere, in the midst of those dark Scandinavian woods,

I pull over to the side of the road and make a complete stop.

In the rear view mirror I see him on the shoulder, camera in hand.

Before I have had the chance to rummage through the glove compartment for another song, he is back, and we speed off.

We speed off through the pines, leaving the sunset behind.

meet me in the morning 1

My foot presses down. We accelerate.

A small country road. 90. 110. 130.

I want to let go. To simply let go of the wheel.

See what happens.

they say the darkest hour, is right before the dawn / they say the darkest hour, is right before the dawn 2

An incline. In the distance, a clearing.

Anticipation.

My hand releases its grip on the wheel and rests heavily on my thigh. The leg is forced down. Car speeds up.

At the top of the hill we come out through the pines onto a straight stretch of open road.

A gash through the landscape.

The volume is turned up.

We come out onto a stretch of open road and I let go.

I let go of the wheel and close my eyes. I close my eyes as the man on the radio bellows out the last lines of the song.

look at the sun, sinking like a ship / look at the sun, sinking like a ship 3

A black and white photograph.

Black and white in name only.

An endless array of grey dots really renders a house set amidst trees.

Well. House implies home, and a home welcomes us. This is no home. A dwelling at best.

Shelter in any case.

A scene seen from a distance, from the shoulder of the road perhaps.

The black house I'm describing from memory emits no light, reflects nothing.

No hope there, no refuge.

No mirror to bask in.

We are pulled in. Pulled in by the force of gravity, by the gravity of the situation at hand.

Lures, and promises never to be fulfilled.

The house is a black hole toying with our expectations of what might be revealed in that ever expanding field of darkness.

A black hole threatening to engulf everything in its vicinity.

Just like his puddles.

Just like him

We step back.

Without this, and without that we are taken aback.

He takes his leave, leaving it up to us.

A here, there and then, where he once was.

Just an image. 4

Untitled, dimensions vary.

A house, or shelter in any case.

He knows. That is, he knew.

In front of this picture, or the memory of this picture, I too know.

I know something.

A certainty beyond words.

Beyond or before them..

Morten Andenæs is an artist and writer. He worked as an assistant for Tom Sandberg from 2005-2006.

1,2,3 Bob Dylan, 'meet me in the morning', 4 Jean Luc Godard. This text was written for the launch of Objektiv #11 / Tom Sandberg.

Nina Strand 7/28/22 Nina Strand 7/28/22

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

Afterimage by Adam Broomberg:

This is everything that is wrong with the world and how dangerous photography can intersect with it. The idea of a conflict zone as a backdrop for an Annie Leibovitz shoot for Vouge is vile. Posing the “First Lady” against a destroyed airplane in which people presumably died. Depicting a politician as an icon hero without any nuanced understanding of their function and complicity in this 155 day old brutal war. A superficial glossy depiction of a hero in the Hollywood mould. The whole way this conflict has been covered (from the hierarchy of empathy we witnessed in the way white refugees were embraced) to the “cowboy and indians“ genre analysis of the actual conflict. Somehow deep down I think these pictures confirm our need for a binary understanding of the world as good and evil, for an outdated model of male heroes with their female enablers. All the while the faceless and for now nameless youth die daily. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way supporting Putin but this shoot feeds into all the toxic heteronormative patriarchal ideas that make war inevitable.

Both images by Annie Leibovitz for Vouge.

This text was first published at Broomberg’s Instagram.

Nina Strand 6/14/22 Nina Strand 6/14/22

GORO TRONSMO

…My colleague, wearing dark glasses for the occasion, doesn’t look convinced. While actors pretend they inhabit the space, doing everyday chores, he expresses his relief that the museum has finally opened, but points out that this show of artists not from the collection had become outdated even before it opened.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

The big installation by Goro Tronsmo, in the main exhibition I Call it Art, resembles a small apartment on the top floor of the new museum. I laugh over a note placed on one of the railings: Beware! Art

The museum’s opening show has been met with much criticism, and the architect of the institution is furious about the various new works with which the big light hall has been filled. The government has spent too many millions on all the delays, while the curators have tried to make a show for an imaginary nineteen-year-old woman who rarely sees exhibitions. There’s so much noise around this building that this handwritten piece of paper cheers me up.

My colleague, wearing dark glasses for the occasion, doesn’t look convinced. While actors pretend they inhabit the space, doing everyday chores, he expresses his relief that the museum has finally opened, but points out that this show of artists not from the collection had become outdated even before it opened.

‘They should have re-curated it when they realised how delayed the opening would be. The artists here are way too established now – there’s nothing new to see,’ he says while walking into the pretend gallery in the gallery, which is so meta it almost makes him laugh.

I came to the preview in order to write about the photography in the collection, but all that was on display was the generation from the Bergen school from the 1990s, with one or two newer artists in other rooms. So I joined him to see I Call it Art.

‘The architect has renamed it, ‘I call it Garbage’,’ he is saying as we go out on the balcony to look at Siri Aurdal’s monumental sculptures from the permanent collection. ‘But actually it isn’t bad.’

The note is a small but welcome reminder of who this experience is for. If the show is made for someone who needs a gentle push to see more art, and at the same time is funny and weird enough for my truly critical critic friend, then maybe it’s working. And once this large space for temporary exhibitions is filled with its next show, like any other museum showing art, no-one will need to warn anyone about anything.

Nina Strand 6/8/22 Nina Strand 6/8/22

GABRIEL OROZCO

I’ve loved this photograph for years. The tender way in which dog is portrayed sleeping over these rocks. The dog looks so gentle, almost like a floating figure. There’s a harsh beauty in the photograph, a tension between the delicate creature and the hardness of the vertical rocks.

Afterimage by Daniel Mebarek:

This photograph speaks really well about the figure of the street dog, which is an integral part of the urban landscape in Latin American. The street dog is something that is common to cities across the continent, including in my hometown, La Paz. I think for example of Alex Soth’s beautiful book Dog Days Bogotá (2007), where the street dog is kind of like an omnipresent figure and a symbol of different aspects of the Latin American metropolis: informality, precarity and violence. Like Orozco, Soth portrays this figure with a lot of tenderness and dignity.

Throughout the history of photography, the street dog has also come to stand as a metaphor for the photographer. The idea that the photographer wanders the streets very much like an errant dog. Photographers have very much seen themselves reflected in this figure. I am reminded for instance of the book cover of Josef Koudelka’s Exiles (1988). You have this very famous photograph of a black dog on a snowy field that looks like a demon. I think it’s very telling that he chose this image to speak of his own exile, of his years of rootlessness, drifting across different countries. There is also the strikingly similar photograph Stray Dog (1971) by Daido Moriyama, which depicts a dog with a similar pose and menacing allure. Moriyama also shows himself as this stray dog, as an outsider or a renegade living within a rather strict Japanese society.

There are other well-known photo series that come to mind such as Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (1996 – 1998) by John Divola, which I also find really beautiful. Dogs can be threatening but they also symbolize freedom. They are above all instinctive creatures. Why are dogs so urged to chase cars? Why are photographers so urged take a specific photo?

So, there's this interesting history about how photographers have captured street dogs. I also recently discovered Francis Alÿs’ Sleepers (1999 – 2001). The series combines photographs of street dogs and homeless dwellers taken from the ground-level in a rather tender way. There is even something noble about the way these two figures are portrayed here. And we’re back again to the question that was sparked by Orozco’s photograph when I saw it all those years ago: how can artists portray something in a dignified manner? Scholar Dork Zabunyan has argued that we all have a “right to a dignified image”. It’s an issue that ceaselessly fuels my own practice.

Nina Strand 6/1/22 Nina Strand 6/1/22

JENNIFER BOLANDE

Afterimage by Bjarne Bare:

A few years ago, my companion over a hyper-inflated hotel breakfast was a loud Italian gesticulating furiously over the amount of food available and the inevitable waste. The hotel advertised itself as the most generous hotel breakfast of the north. The man was Oliviero Toscani, who in 1991 famously made an image for a billboard depicting a kissing nun and priest, promoting the clothing brand Benetton in Catholic Italy. Amongst other campaigns were a depiction of a woman of colour breastfeeding a fair skinned child, and three seemingly identical human hearts with the superimposed text ‘White, Black, Yellow’. The provocateur Toscani confessed that he’d never had a gallery exhibition, but that he saw his photography as belonging to the realm of art. The billboard was his arena, in which he reached millions of people through an overstated use of OOH – Out Of Home Advertising.

The OOH created for an audience in the moving car is credited to the advertisements for Burma Shave shaving cream, placed along US highways from 1926 until the 1960s. Single words were scattered throughout the landscape, only conveying a meaning as one passed by in a vehicle at speed. In Tom Waits’ song of the same name, depicting a woman on the run, who’d ‘rather take my chances out in Burma Shave’, he draws on this nostalgic image of the American highway.

In contrast to aired advertising, whether over the radio or through a televised message, the billboard became an arena for the development of the still image, a potential perhaps overlooked in the history of photography. Walker Evans, however, showed an early fascination with billboards, as in his famous Houses and Billboards in Atlanta of 1936, a sign of the times contrasting vernacular housing with mass-produced advertising. OOH calls for the punctum, a form of imagery where an immediate impact is key, in contrast to much of the pensive imagery traditionally found in the art world. The mega-scale advertising image might have developed in parallel with its cousins in the print media or the gallery, yet it usually still relies on a slogan or caption. It is thus interesting to follow the shift in billboard advertising on the west coast of the US, where the usual product placement recently is seen replaced by billboards promoting content, often simply advertised by a hashtag and an image in where only the know-how will follow suit. While pensive images have traditionally run the risk of being overlooked in an ever-more attention-seeking climate, perhaps they will gain a new focus due to this content-driven form of advertising, targeting ever increasing sub-cultural populations or markets.

For the first edition of Desert-X, artist Jennifer Bolande photographed the desert landscape on her commute between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. The resulting artworks were plastered over massive billboards along the highway. During a split second, one was able to witness a merging of the real horizon in the background and the superimposed image floating above the highway, resulting in a brief stopping of time. A tribute to fleeting time, and the contrast between image and reality, the images were powerful, yet bore no slogan or apparent message.

The potential for billboard images to draw a response from passers-by in public space fits well with the ideals of public art. The same is also true for video works, aided by increasing advances in technology, as demonstrated by the Times Square Arts: Midnight Moment project, which has broadcast video works by artists from Andy Warhol to Fischli & Weiss on billboards since 2012. The question asked by Wolfgang Tillmans for his Mexico City billboard at Sonora 128 in 2016, ¿dónde estamos? (Where Are We?) sums up the existential power of this format.

Nina Strand 5/16/22 Nina Strand 5/16/22

XAVIERA SIMMONS

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

It is an image in a image. A woman holds a black and white photograph in one hand; in the other is an old Roloflex camera. One eye is looking through the camera, and the other is staring directly at us. Do we see and understand? In the black and white image she holds, a group of Black men sit on a stoop. The one on the highest step, in the middle, points to his black eye. It is a story of violence. This gesture of an image of an image is repeated in other works that make up a larger series of portraits, where different figures hold images and apparatuses, all part of the current exhibition Nectar by the New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons at KADIST in Paris.

For her first show in France, Simmons has included photographs from the AFRO American Newspaper’s collection of historic images in her large-scale portraits. The newspaper, which has ‘crusaded for racial equality and economic advancement for Black Americans for 128 years’, was formed in 1892 by John Henry Murphy Sr., a former enslaved man who gained freedom following the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Simmons’ work deals with the United States‘ dark history of slavery. Her show was timely this Spring in France, when far-right politician Marine Le Pen gained 41 percent of the vote in the presidential election. In the small gallery in Montmartre, French audiences are forced to reflect on their own colonial history.

In the accompanying catalogue, Simmons talks about working with the vast archive of photographs in the collection to reclaim the history of the people in the images. Enslaved people, she explains, have been excluded from any official archive: ‘Somebody Black somewhere said something, sang something, painted something, made something, believed in something. And this has not been passed down, it has not been inserted in the canon.’

The Black man in the image is telling his story, pointing to the harm done to him. The group around him bears witness to his story. The old camera held by the figure presenting the image has its own connotations and history. But Simmons wishes to turn the archive away from being an object of the past, to show us how it can be a: ‘repository of language that we can draw from as we propose new models of repair.’

Nina Strand 4/27/22 Nina Strand 4/27/22

JACOB HOLDT

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

There is a book in my library, American Pictures by Jacob Holdt, that has followed me through every move I’ve made. Holdt became famous when he hiked around the USA in the 1970s with a small camera in his pocket. He spent the night where he could, documenting racism and inequality between black and white people. These photos became the slideshow American Pictures, published as a book in 1977. Holdt has inspired many who work with sociology within photography today, and is often compared to another Dane with the same first name, Jacob Riis, who a hundred years earlier, in 1890, documented the ghetto in New York in the book How the Other Half Lives. Holdt told me in an interview that he discovered the book by Riis in a store in San Francisco and stole it to look at it on the road. He also claimed that while Riis held the world’s first analogue slideshow, he himself would be the one to give the last.

Interviewed on the occasion of the exhibition Faith, Hope and Love, Jacob Holdt’s America in 2009 at Louisiana Museum, still sporting his long, braided beard, and with no plans to retire, he spoke about his extensive travels with his slideshow to schools, trying to educate young adults about the hardships suffered by Black Americans. It took the museum 35 years to exhibit his work, but Holdt had always refused to show his pictures in museums, seeing them not as art but as a fulcrum for workshops on racism, and saying that is was only by accident that he photographed at all. It was his parents who gave him a camera in order to see more from his travels. He had never held one before, and taught himself all the technical aspects. He claims that although he wasn’t a good photographer, he was an excellent vagabond. There’s nothing wrong with the images though; he knows what he’s doing when he frames them, as with the three black kids standing beneath a billboard commercial where two white children are juxtaposed with the text ‘Independent Life’, or the three black women in a beauty pageant smilingly giving the Black Power salute.

I went with Holdt to the small Danish town Ringe, where the lucky recipients at a local high school sat mesmerised for several hours in front of his images of poor black people, very rich white people and poor white members of the Ku Klux Klan. As he told me in the car on our way, he just wants to understand racism, to see the bigger picture of where this hate comes from, and he wants to smother the racists with love and make the hate disappear. Maybe his thinking is propelled by the Scandinavian saying that trolls disappear when they’re exposed to sunlight.

This text is from Perpetual Photographs, Objektiv #21. Find the latest book from Holdt here.

Nina Strand 4/23/22 Nina Strand 4/23/22

ZINEB SEDIRA

In a year afflicted by the war in Ukraine, and by the remains of the pandemic, the Biennale in Venice did actually open. Cecilia Alemani curated the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, which takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington. Alemani describes the book as a ‘magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

In a year afflicted by the war in Ukraine, and by the remains of the pandemic, the Biennale in Venice did actually open. Cecilia Alemani curated the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, which takes its title from a book by Leonora Carrington. Alemani describes the book as a ‘magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination. It is a world where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else.’ The show included brilliant photographic works by Elle Pèrez, Joanna Piotrowska, Louise Lawler among others. In the latter’s room, the artist Alexandra Pirici performed Encyclopedia of Relations, 2022.

While the Russian Pavilion was closed after curator Raimundas Malašauskas, and artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov pulled out in protest against the invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian presence in the Italian city was ensured by curator Maria Lanko. She, together with her team, packed 72 copper funnels – components of the sculpture Fountain of Exhaustion by artist Pavlo Makov – into boxes and loaded them into her car, which she drove out of Kyiv in late February.

War was very much present in this year’s biennale. In Relocating a Structure, Maria Eichhorn dug up the foundations of the German Pavilion and stripped the walls of layers of plaster. In doing so, she revealed the joins between the original Pavilion of 1909 and the extensions made by the Nazis in 1938. The American Museum for Palestine showed work by several Palestinian artists in the Palazzo Mora as a reminder of the constant conflict in that country.

But ‘change’ is a word that often came to mind when looking at other works, such as Francis Alÿs films of children playing, The Nature of the Game, in the Belgian Pavilion, Melanie Bonajo’s film and installation, When the Body Says Yes, at the Chiesetta della Misericordia for the Dutch Pavillion, or The Concert by Latifa Echakhch in the Swiss Pavilion.

The song played at the end of the film Dreams Have No Titles by Zineb Sedira for the French Pavilion is still singing in my head. With the French presidential election just days away on the occasion of the press preview, Sedira, who is the first Algerian artist to represent France at the Biennale, talked about the cinema of the 1960s and 70s, the first co-productions between France, Italy and Algeria. The Pavilion was transformed into a series of sets reconstructed from notable examples of these films, which function as records of cultural and political activism in France, Italy and Algeria. With the film and installation, the artist wished to embrace themes such as the fight against discrimination and racism, decolonisation, freedom, solidarity, identity and family, questioning notions of identity, acceptance of the other, memory, and collective versus individual history.

It was this film that lingered in my mind while taking the ferry back to the airport. In the final credits, one could see Sedira dancing to Express Yourself by Charles Wright, showing – like the oily bodies hugging in Bonajo’s film, Pirici’s performers asking us to close our eyes and hold out our hands to experience touch, or even Eichhorn’s alteration of the Pavilion’s structure – how ‘everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else’.

Kjell Ruben Strøm 3/29/22 Kjell Ruben Strøm 3/29/22

LEE GODIE

Afterimage by Amy Sherlock:

I have always found the question, “Who do you think you are?” (used rhetorically, as an accusation) to be an odd one. The implication is that one should know oneself, or know one’s place, as if it were ever a question of knowing, and not just imagining. Nowhere can the gulf between one’s own self image and external appearances be revealed with such brutality as in the self portrait: there is no better stage for one’s self delusions. Lee Godie had more reason than most to seek the succour of self-delusion. She lived out the majority of her later years homeless on the blustery streets of downtown Chicago. A self- taught artist, she drew and sketched, hawking her wares to passing business people and leaving the proceeds in the care a nearby department store.Her self portraits, many enlivened with paint or pen, some coquettishly flirtatious, others autographed like the calling cards of a budding starlet, were taken in a photobooth in a bus station in the city, which was also the location of the locker that housed most of her worldly possessions. I look at Lee Godie in these images and I think of Vivian Leigh’s Blanche du Bois in her worn-out Mardi Gras outfit – in that scene in A Streetcar Named Desire where she is so wide-eyed and fearful and Marlon Brando’s Stanley so devastatingly handsome – wrapping herself in her airs and her rhinestone tiaras to buttress a fragile sense of self. But I don’t pity Godie. She looks mischievous; she looks happy. She wouldn’t let any Stanley try to tell her that she wasn’t a queen.

Nina Strand 2/28/22 Nina Strand 2/28/22

RODIN

Afterimage by Marianne Heier:

Rodin's small bronze sculpture shows a seated woman. The posture is knotty, awkward, as if she is forced. One arm is stretched behind her back and she is seated a little askew. You can see the bones in the ribcage under the empty, hanging breasts. The shoulder joints protrude. She is skinny, but her belly is swollen under the wrinkled skin. The arms and legs are thin and sinewy. The whole body has sort of slumped. She bends her neck and looks down, her gaze almost directed inward, towards her own body. As if in shame. Everything here points downwards.

This sculpture from 1885 to 87 exists in several variants with different titles: Dried-Up Springs, The Old Courtesan or Winter. The titles tell us how the artist wanted us to see this figure. We are supposed to look through or past her, to imagine who she once was, not who she is. The work is about a tragedy, a loss, something that moves towards the end. The artist makes it clear that this woman belongs to the past. She is grief.

I'm on my way to becoming an ageing woman myself. The body of the helmet-maker’s wife is both familiar and foreign to me. While there are plenty of ageing men in Western sculptural tradition, ageing women are rarely represented. And while the ageing men are portrayed with respect, even admiration, as philosophers, leaders, authorities, the few ageing women are a sad sight. They are grotesque, pathetic, laughable versions of the young bodies they once were. The necklines that once framed round, bouncy, firm breasts, now reveal now empty, sagging sacks. The seductive contrapposto poses have become angular, stiff and unstable. Toothless grins replace soft smiles, faces are hollow. Time makes men experienced, worthy and wise, while it makes women grotesque, almost repulsive perversions of themselves. The artists do not hide their contempt. The once beautiful wife of the helmet-maker knows herself that she has passed; she feels the weight of the artist's gaze on her and bends under it.

When I was young, I often struggled with the feeling of constantly being evaluated as an object of other people's gazes. Was I attractive enough? Pretty enough? Thin enough? Well-dressed enough? Pleasant enough? Too much? Too little? It was shameful and distracting, and it was a lonely experience, despite the fact that I probably share it with almost every other woman. I remember thinking that when my body was no longer fertile, I would no longer be perceived as an object. I would be free from the evaluative gaze and the eternal shame. The distractions would fall away. I would become a subject.

But the helmet-maker's wife, and the other ageing women in art history, are not subjects. They are broken, worn-out objects; pathetic now that they can no longer be used for what the female body was created for: reproduction. But they still exist in the world. What is their purpose now? They are difficult to control, impossible, opinionated and nasty; they belong to the dark. Useless. In contrast to the life experience of the ageing man, which is represented with respect and interest, the knowledge of the ageing woman is threatening, dangerous. She is portrayed as ugly, she is mother-in-law, witch. Disgusting, ridiculous. In this sense, Rodin's figure is perhaps a step in the right direction: the helmet-maker's wife is at least not obviously evil or mad, she is just sad.

Art historians have praised Rodin's ability to show the beauty of the ugly in this figure: that he was able to make the ugly beautiful. I think it's the other way around. Through his gaze, I think this body is made ugly. The helmet-maker's wife isn’t ugly. What we see is the artist's gaze on her, not herself. In fact, and without any rhetoric, I think the helmet-maker's wife is beautiful. Her thin body is interesting, dramatic, complex and hyper-elegant. Her face is sharp, deep and intelligent. She is rich in light and shade. I wish she had a name of her own. I wish she had refused to be ashamed, refused to sit in that uncomfortable, twisted position. Ageing women are not sadness. I wish Rodin had made a portrait of a person instead of a projection of masculine horror. I wish the helmet-maker's wife would straighten her back and meet my gaze.

Nina Strand 2/14/22 Nina Strand 2/14/22

OTTO DIX

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

‘But, where ARE you?,’ the lady sitting next to me screams into her iPhone. Dressed in black tights and something between a sweater and a dress, super stylish, she reminds me of Otto Dix’s Portrait of Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). All that is missing is the cigarette and the cocktail. Suddenly, she yells ‘I AM HERE!!!!’, but offers no location or further explanation. People around her are giving her meaningful stares, intimating that she should speak in a lower voice or maybe not even speak at all. But we’re in a crowded, noisy café, so she doesn’t bother me.

I saw the painting by Dix at the Pompidou this fall. ‘People must gravitate around this lady’, I thought while studying it, ‘she looks as if she’s seen it all’. Von Harden, who worked as a journalist in Berlin in the 1920s, sits at a small table in the Romanische Café, on which sit a cocktail and a cigarette case. The museum writes about the painting: ‘the cold, satirical realism typifies the New Objectivity movement to which the painter belonged. Inspired by early 16th-century German masters (Cranach, Holbein), he embraced the tempera on wood panel technique as well as the choice to exhibit the ugliness of humankind.’ But she isn’t ugly to me. In her red-check sweater dress and dark red lipstick, cigarette in hand, she sits in her pink corner of the café as if she owns the place The only thing that doesn’t seem right to me in the image is that the painter has given her a stocking that is sagging around her knee. This small detail seems staged, falsely painted into the work by Dix. Somehow, it suggests prejudice against her, like that of the people annoyed by the noisy woman in the café next to me.

She’s done with her call now, and is busy gathering her things to leave. Maybe she’s going to meet the person she was talking to on the phone. I hope she doesn’t feel she has to go, or that she has to be quiet, to take up less space. I think we should do the opposite: be like Von Harden in the 1920s. Have a table of our own. Talk more and louder. Claim our space.

Nina Strand 2/7/22 Nina Strand 2/7/22

MARGOT WALLARD

Afterimage by Margot Wallard:

I have an image that’s been on mind for many years. And I’m so fascinated by this image that I have it on the wall in my house. (I rarely put pictures on the wall).

It’s an archive family picture, a portrait of my grandparents when they were young in Algeria.

Archive pictures are attractive for obvious reasons, which is why I’m often wary of them. But this one is like an obsession for me. When I first saw it years ago, I was blown away and I still am whenever I look at it.

This is because it’s my grandparents from a time I never knew.

Because they seem foreign and yet so familiar to me.

Because it’s about the passage of time.

Because it’s about them as a couple as I’ve never known them.

Because it’s about them. How they pose in front of the camera.

Because it’s not only an old picture, it’s a magic picture. A magic moment.

Nina Strand 2/4/22 Nina Strand 2/4/22

ALEX PRAGER

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

The idea of the recently published book The Photograph That Changed My Life is simple: over 50 photographers, musicians, collectors and actors are invited to ‘write from the heart’, as editor Zelda Cheatle explains in the blurp, about the most important photograph they have seen. Contributors include Adam Bromberg, Nan Goldin and David George.

The American photographer Alex Prager chose this still from Neša Paripović’s film N.P. 1977, in which the artist depicts his walk through Belgrade, as he moves with swift determination, taking shortcuts to get to wherever he is headed as fast as he can. The film was shown at Trondheim Kunsthall some years ago, and as the press release states, Paripović ‘uses the city as a mirror in which individual identity is constructed’. Prager writes that, having just begun producing scenes that walk a line between reality and artifice, she finds in this shot of Paripović’s leap across rooftops ‘the perfect balance of a meticulously staged scenario joined with the raw and wild’.

For this column, where every writer describes an image that they find impossible to get out of their mind, I’ve chosen this still, because it keeps me hanging on after having closed the book. This jump could end tragically, and those who haven’t seen the film don’t know the outcome. The uncertainty reminds me of the fate of the 75-year-old French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin, who recently died while attempting to row across the Atlantic Ocean. Savin, who had crossed the ocean before in a large barrel, described the trip as a way to ‘laugh at old age’.

I was rooting for him to make the trip, since it would be a beautiful statement on the fact that age doesn’t matter. And even though he failed, it still is, since anyone could have died in the same conditions. Seen in this light, Paripović’s jump and hasty tour of the city also become a salute to the fact that anything is possible in any part of one’s life.

Nina Strand 1/31/22 Nina Strand 1/31/22

HENNI ALFTAN

Afterimage by Alina Vergnano:

Time has gone weird lately. Or at least, something has changed in the way I perceive its passage. Its velocity goes in waves: days go fast, and faster, and then suddenly they slow down, as if the hours were on the verge of stopping, only to start racing again. When I think about this elastic movement, my mind keeps returning to Henni Alftan and her series of diptychs, Déjà vu, and in particular to one: Haircut (Déjà vu).

Henni Alftan, Haircut (Déjà-vu), 2020, oil on canvas; 2 parts, Courtesy KARMA, New York. — Henni Alftan, *Haircut (Déjà-vu)*, 2020, oil on canvas; 2 parts, Courtesy KARMA, New York.

What draws my mind, and eyes, to this image, is its simultaneous depiction of time passing and time standing still. When I look at those scissors with a straight cascade of chestnut hair in between the shiny blades, I feel the stillness evoked by the precise brushstrokes, but also a soft pull to the moment coming next. It is not the tug of a far-removed future, but still, it is future. These two canvases bring me back to a haunting childhood question: what do we miss when our eyes blink? In my mind, the void left between the two images is filled by a sound, a snip. Something has unequivocally occurred; it is something subtle, yet radical. The scissors have closed and the hair has fallen, even if we missed the moment when it happened.

In my own work, time and change are central and, when I paint or draw, my main preoccupation is how to preserve their flowing nature. Things tend to happen fast and fluidly in my studio, and I normally respond more to images that are somehow similar to mine in nature. But the eerie, quasi-stillness in Alftan’s work is magnetic to me. It is like watching a very very thin still, distilling our days. It is disturbing, but I can’t stop looking.

Nina Strand 1/11/22 Nina Strand 1/11/22

ANNE IMHOF

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

One image still on my mind from last year – one remaining among a surprisingly high number of exhibitions held during another year of the pandemic – is from the 2021 video Untitled (Wave) by Anne Imhof. It was exhibited in the cellar of Palais de Tokyo during Imhof’s grand exhibition Natures Mortes, part of the annual Carte Blanche programme. The exhibition was scheduled to open in March 2020 but was postponed due to the various lockdowns.

The film depicts the artist’s collaborator Eliza Douglas on a beach, dressed only in a pair of trousers, whip in hand, contemplating the waves rolling in, sometimes lashing out at them. Her hair is loose, her body is free. Having walked through Imhof’s halls of mirrors and studied her works, as well as those of other invited artists, this one stood out. Who wouldn’t like to beat the waves at this point? The woman’s repetitive whipping movements seemed cathartic. It made me think about how the pandemic can be used as a reset. Enough is enough.

I thought about the video again when I read Anne Berest’s editorial in the French magazine Madame, the supplement of Le Figaro, about how she writes all the time, working whenever there is a window. She calls this the luxury of freedom, and reflects on how it sets a good example for her daughters, showing them the joy of working and having a larger project in life. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. It’s taken me years to learn to devote myself to my work, to learn how to say no without feeling I need to give a lot of excuses and explanations. Reading the text made me think of Douglas whipping the waves. She has this freedom. Berest has it. I want it too.

Nina Strand 10/1/21 Nina Strand 10/1/21

JASMINA CIBIC

Afterimage by Lillian Davies:

In the early 1950s Stalin erected the Palace of Culture and Science in the center of Warsaw as a gift to the Polish people, newly part of his Soviet Union. There’s an Olympic-sized swimming pool inside the 42-floor tower, with a diving well and three platform boards. Jasmina Cibic’s three channel 4K video film, The Gift (2021) opens there, with sweeping color images and sounds of chlorinated water trickling through the drains. In her opening shots, three pre-adolescent girls, hair pulled back tight from their pale foreheads, walk one after another along the pool’s tiled edge. They are dressed to perform and to compete, wearing simple one-piece suits, two in navy blue, one in dark red. A stately piano melody and a cool female voice over accompanies them as they climb metal stairs and await one another at the top of the diving platforms. A dive, a front flip, and a pencil shaped plunge, the athletes pierce the calm surface of the crystal-clear water, finger tips first, or toes, at exactly the same moment, amplifying the cutting sound of a splash. Exuding youth, strength and beauty, like Zeus’s three muses, these young women embody ideals that are beyond themselves. Cibic filmed underwater, and seen from below, the moment they break the surface is like the burst of a firecracker, or three. For a split second after their plunge, they are unique, liberated, swimming slowly to the surface and an inevitable panel of judges.

Cibic’s newest film, unfolds primarily in Paris, inside the French Communist Party Headquarters, a gift from architect Oscar Niemeyer. Here, Cibic’s three male characters, “three gifts,” as she calls them, The Engineer, The Diplomat, and the most handsome, The Artist, played by Downtown Abbey’s Lachlan Nieboer, devise a plan: “We will organize a competition to determine the symbol of our renovated future.” And so it is, that each, speaking in turn of the ideological virtues of architecture, music and art, are put into competition to determine the gift that will appease and reunify an unnamed and divided nation.

Four actresses play a cast of allegorical judges, referred to in Cibic’s narrative as the Four Fundamental Freedoms: from Fear, from Want, of Speech and of Worship (terms borrowed from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 speech aimed to spur American support for entry into World War II). The characters’ dramatic period hair, makeup and clothes — perfectly matched to Niemeyer’s 1971 construction date — are a contrast to the unadorned sobriety of Cibic’s three divers. Cibic’s judges’ polish and dress are reminders of the workings and power of spectacle, performances of gender, seduction and status, that fuel political debate and public opinion. The judges’ exchange begins as a sort of philosophical debate and quickly disintegrates into a battle of practical nonsense—jargon.

It’s a jargon that sounds like art-speak or International Art English, as named in the brilliant Triple Canopy study, that eerily familiar language drained of meaning through translation, repetition and misunderstanding. Each line of Cibic’s script is ready-made, like her characters and soundtrack for this film, pulled from archives, transcriptions and recordings of politicians and artists speaking about the ideologies behind modern artworks:

“Art itself if a gift of the creative spirit.”

“The artist is a political being: alert.”

“Art is not made to decorate apartments. It is a weapon to be used against the enemy.”

Not only historical ready-mades, each element—script, music and sites—of Cibic’s The Gift was given as such. MAC Lyon curator Mathieu Lelièvre Lelièvre cites the French social anthropologist Marcel Mauss whose 1924 essay remains preeminent for studies of gift exchange. For Mauss, gift giving implies a social contract performed in public rituals. There’s a stage, costuming and choreography that Cibic forces us to see. Gift-giving can be a tool of soft power, a political and cultural phenomena she’s been exploring since her exhibition for the Slovenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990, shortly the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Nye, soft power implies “organizing an international agenda and structuring world politics by using resources of intangible power like culture, ideology and institutions.” Mobilizing art for political ends in other words, though sociologist Alexandre Kazerouni warns, in his recent paper, Musées and Soft Power in the Persian Gulf (2015), that Nye’s soft power is not economic power. It is the intellectual and ideological conception of an artwork that matters, not its market value.

Though Cibic doesn’t mention him by name, Lewis Hyde’s eponymous book, first published in 1983, looms large. Hyde wrote as a poet, for other poets, searching for a history and meaning of gift giving, gift having, in a modern society founded on commercial exchange. His subtitle, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, reads like a line of Cibic’s ready-made script. As Margaret Atwood wrote recently in Paris Review, in his book, Hyde seems to be looking for a definition of the nature of art. “Is a work of art a commodity with a money value, to be bought and sold like a potato, or is it a gift on which no real price can be placed, to be freely exchanged?” Atwood asks. She proposes an answer in Hyde’s explorations, perhaps in her own work, something also glimpsed in Cibic’s cinematic ruminations: “Gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.” Stalin may have demanded the labor of ten thousand men to build his palace, but there is freedom in the water, in swimming under the surface. It’s Cibic’s triptych image of her divers’ splash, a sort of momentary escape, that stays in my mind, like a gift.

Nina Strand 7/14/21 Nina Strand 7/14/21

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

Louise Bourgeois, who called herself a prisoner of her memories, was three years old when the First World War began, and moved from France to New York two years before the Second. She began to make her self-enclosed structures known as the Cells in 1989. The objects collected within them, which one can only view from the outside, all had a personal resonance and history: ‘Each “Cell” deals with the pleasure of the voyeur’, said Bougeois in 1991, ‘the thrill of looking and being looked at. The “Cells” either attract or repulse each other. There is this urge to integrate, merge, or disintegrate.’

Her work has been on my mind a great deal during the last two weeks. The day Putin decided to begin a war against Ukraine, I visited two exhibitions in London where one could see her cells: The Woven Child, at Hayward Gallery and A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920–2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery. The first is a retrospective with a focus exclusively on Bourgeois’ work using fabrics and textiles. The second is a survey of the studio through the work of over 80 artists. Featuring Bourgeois alongside contemporary artists such as Walead Beshty, Lisa Brice, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Mequitta Ahuja, the exhibition gives a peak into how an artist works. This grand survey also demonstrates how artists can and do make a change for the better in society, making one question whether an international ban on Russian artists is the right approach to take, especially since Putin himself silences those who speak against him.

Today we live in a state of constant crisis, with conflicts being waged all over the world, millions of displaced refugees, and the aftermath of the pandemic. With this in mind, Bourgeois’ microcosms, described by Okwui Enwezor as works that ‘turn life inside out’, have extra resonance. The 'Cells' represent different types of pain, Bourgeois has explained: ‘The physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional? It's a circle going round and round.’

Nina Strand 5/9/21 Nina Strand 5/9/21

MOHAMED BOUROUISSA

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

The couple in the café next to me are either on their first date or their last. It’s difficult to know if they’re shy or bored with each other. They’ve been discussing a friend. I’m hoping he’ll never hear their opinions on how sadly he leads his life. I’m on time and happy for the entertainment these two bring while I wait. My friend arrives late. I still suggest we have a glass wine before we go in, it’s been so long. But he’s in a rush and so I quickly gather my things. He doesn’t look me in the eye.

We begin in a sky-lit room that contains only some speakers and small chairs to sit on. Everything is white. Everywhere is sound. Many voices are shouting the word ‘hara’, used by young people as a warning if the police get too close. I wonder if there’s a warning word I can shout to myself about a friend acting weirdly. The thing is, I didn’t really have time for this exhibition visit. This was his idea. ‘All I do is try to keep it together’, I say to him, or to his hair; his back is turned to me. He looks at the wall text – explaining how the artist uses his work to call attention to young people from ethnic-minority backgrounds – and says one should always compare.

We move further into the exhibition, passing a labyrinthine structure of fences with images of refugees on them. The complicated installation makes perfect sense to me in this tense situation. In the next room, we spend time in front of large photographs hung on only one wall. I am moved by the presence and focus the images acquire when exhibited like this. He says he couldn’t disagree more.

We’ve nothing left to talk about. When we pass a sort of garden planted with very thin trees, they seem embarrassed to be there with us. A man is vacuuming around them, something we’d normally laugh about, but my friend still doesn’t meet my eye. I look at his cap, which is on backwards. Who does he think he’s fooling? It does nothing for his receding hairline.

Does one break up with friends? I wonder if I said something stupid last time we met. This is probably my fault. It usually is. He walks quickly through the final room, which is plastered with too many unframed photographs – too many people’s stories we’ll never hear – and makes his way down the stairs. We usually write a wish and hang it on the Wish Tree placed there, but he doesn’t stop.

If I go back to my studio now, I’ll stew for the rest of the afternoon. I write a wish for his health and hang it on the tree, and go back to the café, hoping the couple is still there.

I can still hear the shouting of ‘hara’ for days afterwards.

Mohamed Bourouissa: HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!! Kunsthal Charlottenborg 09 Okt 2021 – 20 Feb 2022. Courtesy the artist, Kamel Mennour and Blum & Poe. Installation photos by David Stjernholm.

Nina Strand 3/30/21 Nina Strand 3/30/21

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

In a currently closed Paris I saw Hiroshi Sugimoto’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, and I spent a long time looking at this beautiful blue work. It was a welcome escape from our lockdown situation.

Sugimoto’s subject matter include lifelike displays in museums of natural history, old American drive-in theaters as well as vast seascapes — as he has investigated time and memory throughout his practice. For him, photography functions as a system for saving memories, it is a time machine.

His current exhibition Theory of Colours at Marian Goodman consists of his new series Opticks. The title of this series is a reference to Sir Isaac Newton’s treatise Opticks, published in 1704. Opticks is according to Sugimoto essentially a series shot using a Polaroid camera, capturing the light that Newton refracted using a prism.

This new body of work is just as meditative as his seascapes. He has previously stated that photography is like a found object. That photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world. But not every photographer has the expertise in finding these ‘found objects’ as Sugimoto.

Known for his precise techniques, long exposures and perfectly composed large format photographs — the philosophical and conceptual aspects of his ouvre is just as important. His photographs reveal the time passing, and the mediums unique ability to render a trace of it.

Nina Strand 3/8/21 Nina Strand 3/8/21

NICOLE EISENMAN, VANESSA BAIRD & LINN PEDERSEN

Nicole Eisenman, Destiny Riding Her Bike, 2020. Photo Thomas Widerberg. Astrup Fearnley Collection. — Nicole Eisenman, *Destiny Riding Her Bike*, 2020. Photo Thomas Widerberg. Astrup Fearnley Collection.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

There's no place like home

On a painting, a drawing and a photograph.

Linn Pedersen, Kiddo, 2021. — Linn Pedersen, *Kiddo*, 2021.

The large painting Destiny Riding Her Bike by Nicole Eisenman has been on my mind since I saw it at the Astrup Fearnley Museum In Oslo a couple of weeks ago. A woman soars off her bike having crashed into a ladder set up against a tree, toppling a man who is trying to save the small cat that intently watches the chance meeting between the two humans. In the March issue of New Yorker, Eisenman explains the image in the article ‘Every Nicole Eisenman Picture Tells a Story’ by Ian Parker. ‘It’s a romantic painting of two people meeting. One is falling off a ladder, and the other is riding a bicycle into the ladder—and popping off the top of the bicycle. She’s flying through the air. And they kind of have their eyes locked on each other. I think it’s very romantic—a Douglas Sirk film still.’ Eisenman explains that the picture is connected to her recent relationship with the art critic and writer Sarah Nicole Prickett, and that the image became ‘this disaster happening, and a kind of romance inside this disaster’. In these days of isolation, I long to meet new people like this, romance or no romance.

Eisenman has mentioned her admiration for the Norwegian artist Karl Ove Knausgaard, to whose project My Struggle Vanessa Baird’s work has been compared. Baird has just published her new book There's no place like home with autobiographical drawings of living with her kids and her mother. Some drawings are accompanied by notes written by her mother about her different needs, reflections and thoughts. When I once interviewed Baird, she told me she called her drawings for short essays, hoping people could get something out of seeing her work. ‘My everyday life is like everyone else's, it's about recognition.’ This book with her mother certainly seems to depict a struggle, to paraphrase Knausgaard. In one drawing, Baird is sweeping a never-ending dirty floor, with several kids around her, while in a corner her frail mother is lying in a bed. On the top she has written: ‘Stuck in genes and affection.’

Another mother and daughter relationship is evoked in the photograph Kiddo by Linn Pedersen, included in her recently opened exhibition Omland at Golsa in Oslo. The image is the imprint left in the snow after her youngest daughter outside their house in Lofoten. It was dark outside, Pedersen tells me, and she was carrying groceries from the car as she walked past this impression her daughter had made in the snow. It reminded Pedersen of a cherub from a Raphael painting mixed with the Michelin man, an astronaut, and craters in the lunar surface. Many of the images in the exhibition are from the north of Norway, where she has moved back with her family after many years in the South. Omland in Norwegian means land surrounding an area, and the exhibition is a kind of rediscovery of her old surroundings, very clearly suggested in two images next to each other, one depicting a mountain and the other a mountain of souvenirs, old business cards, passport photos, notes.

A chance meeting, a daughter taking care of her mother and children, and an imprint of a young child in the snow. All three artists were working with a fulcrum in their own life and family situations, and during these weeks of a new lockdown in Oslo it became for me a triptych almost emblematic of the situation. We just have to make the best of it. And it helps to make or see art.