Curatorial text Randi Nygård
The Drawing Centre, Oslo, octubre 2024
THE TIDES MAKE MOUNTAINS SWAY AND THE SCENT OF PINE CAN CREATE RAIN
Why can we not hold water in our hands? My son wondered about this when he was little. We, the adults, often try to find a solution to such questions. We might answer that we can freeze the water or keep it in a glass or a bucket. But the child’s question is rather about why water is the way it is, and why it flows, not about how we can capture and hold it still. When the Norwegian Drawing Center invited me to curate an exhibition about water, I thought about how, if we imagine water slipping out of our hands, it reveals to us, in a concrete way, the ungraspable nature of the world.
Most of us have had such fundamental experiences and questions that we wondered about as children. I clearly remember standing in a store with my parents, waiting for them to finish talking to some acquaintances. I stood there, thinking and waiting, and suddenly it struck me that I would never become someone else. I am just me, I thought. And when we left the store, I had the same basic question about the tall mountain outside. Could I never become it? I felt dizzy at the thought that I would never become the mountain! It was as if, until that moment, I had taken for granted that I could become someone or something else.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I understood, again and in a different way, that we are not as separate from the world around us as we think we are. We exchange a multitude of things—language, thoughts, images, oxygen, carbon, minerals, nourishment, and waste—with our surroundings. And water helps to move both small and large things through bodies, mountains, lakes, air, and soil.
As I reflected on how water is present in the language of art today, I imagined two different paintings: Thorbjørn Sørensen’s Tulipaner ("Tulips") and Munan Øvrelid’s A Throw of the Dice. In Sørensen’s painting, precise and vital brushstrokes that pull downward, showing a bouquet of drooping tulips, making the lack of water apparent. Meanwhile, Øvrelid has constructed a space from historical seascapes in his painting, where the maelstrom between cloud and wave, surface and space, stillness and movement, light and darkness holds a series of objects from a poem of the French poet Mallarmè, can give rise to a multitude of interpretations.
In our secular culture, as I see it, we have turned toward what we can know, what we can register, sense, grasp, isolate, and understand, and we see that as the world or reality. But with a more poetic mindset, we can become aware that our languages, ideas, and concepts are not the same as the world and in no way can encompass all that exists and happens. In this sense, we do not need to make the world poetic, for it is inherently poetic.
For the exhibition, I have invited artists who, in different ways, see the world with such poetic sensibilities.
This is evident in the works of Sigmund Skard. He often works with new forms and properties of familiar and everyday materials in simple and understated pieces. In this exhibition, he shows a video performance where a teacup meets a nose, and in the photo «Moss hole» we see a turf of moss opening up into itself and into the ground.
For me, new discoveries in natural science can also reveal the unexpected and strange aspects of the world, through knowledge of phenomena that go far beyond what we can sense. Examples include pine trees, seaweed, and kelp releasing compounds that we recognize as the scent of pine and the sea, which help damp to condensate into clouds, or the way tidal and oceanic waves continue inside mountains and can cause them to vibrate. These waves can be heard in Signe Lidén’s work in the exhibition, a moving installation that explores the frequency of tidal waves through recordings from a an underwater fiber cable. A frequency which makes the fleeting masses underneath the earths crust move, and that can cause mountains to sway.
Ane Sivertsen Landfald’s drawing Øye er en gammel struktur ("Eye is an Ancient Structure") is inspired by changes in a 14th-century fresco, which has undergone human interventions and a major flood. The pencil lines follow the movements of nature, in water surfaces and cross-sections of geological layers. The title refers to the discovery of fossilized eyes in minerals, in what was once the ocean floor but now rests on top of the world’s highest mountains.
In Eli Maria Lundgaard’s video installation, breath meets waves, and the origin of life in water’s eternal cycle is connected with how words and language change and colonize, through movements, descriptions, and biology.
Walter Benjamin1 wrote that nature would begin to lament if it had language. Nature grieves because we have given plants and animals names, taking away their possibility to name themselves. But today, perhaps it is we, humans, who grieve that we have overlooked the expression of nature and the connections we have with plants, animals, water, earth, and air.
For me, there is something sorrowful about the people in Thorbjørn Sørensen’s second painting Ved vannet ("By the Water"). It is as if they do not know what to do or how to fit in, while the green lies beneath everything, and is part of them, and the blue strokes of the sea roll forward with strength.
We see life as a vital and organic movement in Maja Nilsen’s collages titled Tilbake til det uformelige (å drikke gjennom huden) og (å leve i symbiose med lav) (Back to the Formless (Drinking Through the Skin) and (Living in Symbiosis with Lichen)), where the environments abilities of a frog and a beetle are central.
Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel has created a scent inspired by a cave he discovered with his father near where he grew up. Through Wenzel’s chemical compositions of scent memories, what is inside the mountain and what grows outside meet, and through scent droplets floating through air and moisture into our noses, the memories of the audience may also be triggered.
There are many ways to be in the world that are not human. Water has its own stories, and perhaps many of them will remain hidden from us. But we can try to imagine other perspectives and we can wonder about that which we don’t know.
A moon calendar is part of the exhibition. It was created by the artist group MEANDER – Association for Ecological Thinking and Artistic Practice, which has invited artists from different parts of the world to create short instructions and exercises about water. The calendar follows the moon’s cycles and shows the tides in various places. Here, imagination flows like a river through environments in different countries, as the artists’ instructions ask us what water can express between different states—when it evaporates, freezes, or melts out of glaciers. How would life be if we didn’t have clocks but followed time in harmony with the sun, moon, water, and other living beings? Who takes care of the water where you live? Can you imagine a rule of care for an entire river system? What would a wetland nature reserve look like in your neighborhood? What if you were an octopus? Or a drop of water reflecting the world around you?
1 On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, 1916, Walter Benjamin