Images From the Book Release at Tronsmo Bookstore

Thank you to everyone that came to the book launch of my latest book How Much Silence Can You Take? at Tronsmo Bookstore. It was such a special evening. Thanks to Frøkedal for the beautiful music and Nina M. Schjønsby for leading the conversation and creating such a special atmosphere. Thanks to Tronsmo Bookstore for hosting. This is the third book I launch there, and I really like how it is becoming a tradition now. Wine, wonderful people, saltines and books.

All photos and sound recording by Ingvild Mjøen Sausjord

If you want to buy art from me, you can read about it here

All my photographs are for sale. Every print is a limited edition. I will gladly help you find the frame that is right for you and the photo.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at info@mariesjovold.no or gallerist Annine Birkeland at Gyldenpris Kunsthall annine@bcap.no

I Feel So Close To Everything I Lost # 17 (2021)

100 x 150 cm

I Feel So Close To Everything I Lost # 18 (2021)

75 x 100 cm

Lilacs and Scissors (2023)

37 x 60 cm

Photographic sculpture of I Feel So Close To Everything I Lost # 24 (2021)

13 x 19 cm photographic sculpture in a glass case 

I Feel So Close To Everything I Lost # 13 (2021)

100 x 150 cm

Opening of Riga Photography Biennale 2022

The exhibition Screen Age III: Still Life continues a series from 2018 that poses existentially pressing questions through observing the way technology is slowly changing people today. How deeply has human consciousness become inseparable from the technological solutions that grow increasingly useful and convenient with each day? Are we the same individuals that we were when we didn’t have smartphones and smart watches that serve us so well in monitoring the world? What are the ways in which our attitudes have shifted in respect to seemingly eternal things and ethical values centuries in the making? What testimony will there remain after our time is past? We invite you to pursue this line of thought by employing the coordinate system used throughout art history – that is, the traditional genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life. These have changed beyond recognition in the new epoch, the screen era.

The first exhibition of the series, Screen Age I: Self-Portrait, examined our relationship with ourselves using tools exclusive to art to observe and reveal the following: 1) models of speaking with and about oneself that were unknown to previous eras; 2) new, convenient, and freely available constructions for creating one’s self-image. The findings confirmed the suspicion that our society has assumed new outward characteristics and radically changed its habits over the past twenty years due to technological innovations rapidly making their way into everyday life. Nevertheless, human nature, as well as human desires, longings, and other motivators have remained unchanged since time immemorial. The second exhibition in the series, Screen Age II: Landscape, took place in 2020. Like the first, it was held in Rīga Art Space. This exhibition analysed changes in the relationship that people have with landscape art today. In short, since we have succumbed to the temptation to set our eyes upon whatever our hearts desire in the virtual world without having to put down our smartphones, the experience of a landscape seems to have lost its original and imposing impression, namely, to engage all our senses. It has, instead, taken on the form of a more rational analysis of units differentiated by the mind.

The thematic focus of the third exhibition, Screen Age III: Still Life, is on the interpretation of the still life in the digital age. It allows for the fact that every genre of photography functions as a routine element of digital culture and a part of an incessant stream of data that reflects itself into different contexts and can be put to use in many different ways (from advertising to iconography). It is interesting to ask whether or not compositions with fruit, flowers, games, wares, musical instruments, household objects, and skulls are outdated. If not, what is it that they are saying today?

Participants: Marianne Bjørnmyr (NO), Johan Rosenmunthe (DK), Sara Skorgan Teigen (NO), Sigrid Viir (EE) and Cloe Jancis (EE), Charles Richardson (UK), Santa France (LV), Nico Krijno (ZA), Līga Spunde (LV), Krišs Salmanis (LV), Vilma Pimenoff (FI)
Curators: Inga Brūvere (LV), Marie Sjøvold (NO)
Text: Aiga Dzalbe (LV)
Image: Līga Spunde, Still Life with Computer Mouse, 2022

More about www.rpbiennial.com

Interview in Artscene Trondheim

Thank you Märit Aronsson for this interview in Artscene Trondheim:
https://artscene.no/

Marie Sjøvold and Charlotte Thiis-Evensen work on the basis of personal events. They have different methods, but share an interest in the transitions in life: between sleep and waking, childhood and adult life, and – as in the exhibition Slutten (The End) – life and death.

The End; life and death. They have worked together for five years. This is the second exhibition they are doing together, and a third is already planned. I met them at Dropsfabrikken.

Märit: How did your collaboration begin? 

 

Charlotte: The first time we met was when I was doing a reportage about sleep for the programme ‘Nasjonalgalleri’ on NRK. Marie was one of the artists I interviewed, and we connected well right away. I asked her and Arne Vinnem, another artist, about doing an exhibition together, at Kristiansand Kunsthall. That was in 2016, and the exhibition, which was given the name Oppvåkning (Awakening) –

was related to among other things sleep, but also to more existential themes.

 

Marie: I knew about Charlotte’s works, also before we began to work together. Working so close to your own life and the various experiences you have in phases of life is a universe I can recognise myself in. The ideas often come to us very intuitively, but we spend a long time, often several years,  working them up to what becomes the final project.

 

You both work on the basis of your own lives, and personal events?

 

M: Yes, there are many similarities, even though the expression is different. There can be transitional phases in life that trigger works. I use the camera as a tool to try to understand existential situations. Something changes; for example one person disappears and a new one appears. When my grandmother suffered from dementia, and at the same time I was very pregnant, I had an acute need to work with that. I use the camera to be there for moments, so I can understand a bigger totality afterwards. The works I create out of pure necessity are, I suppose, those that communicate best, where I have had a genuine need to tell a story. 

 

C: I’m very interested in everyday life here and now, and often think that after all, we all have to die, so it’s just a matter of making the most of life. It isn’t really that I am so afraid to die. 

You, Charlotte, work with documentary, for example in the programme ‘The Architect’s Home’ on NRK. What do you do to balance the documentary and the artistic? 

I work in very varied ways: short documentary films, TV programmes and abstract art films. I use the documentary toolbox as a method which in a way I distort here. How much of it I have experienced personally, the public doesn’t need to know. It may be about personal grief, but insofar as the work isn’t directly documentary, I hope it becomes more universal. 

When you work with death as a theme, it’s likely that in some sense that includes spirituality and religion. What attitude do you have to that in your work?

C: We have both worked with religious rituals. After all, the candlestick on the floor has a certain symbolism, and a direct association with the church interior. That an exhibition can function as a religious space is quite fine. But beyond that neither Marie nor I are particularly religious. 

M: It’s a natural association . I’m not religious, but I’m fascinated by symbolic acts in connection with crucial episodes in life. That you open the window when a person dies, for example. And I have photographed funeral flowers which are included in the exhibition as photographic sculptures. I was given free access to the flowers that had been thrown and spent a lot of time in the chapel in Asker Church. One day while I was standing with the agents from the funeral parlour waiting for a funeral to be over, one of them said to me: you know, death is very small part of my job, I work mostly with life. 

Are art and the exhibition space places where non-religious people can find comfort?

C: Yes, for me that space means a great deal. Both because I’m interested in architecture and because it is a space I can visit to find comfort and peace. And it’s interesting to go back to the art spaces and feel the various experiences you have, independently of the art that is shown there. I’m very fond of the Vigeland Museum, for example. There’s something atmospheric and timeless about it. 

 

M: Our works are open enough to play on a range of different emotions, and comfort can be one of them that can have an impact independently of the viewer’s references and history. For me I suppose quite honestly it’s often the case that I prefer to visit nature to seek comfort. 

 

Speaking of exhibition spaces, tell me about how you composed the exhibition!

 

C: We always make models of the exhibition space – here too. But this time we simply had to reject the original plan and begin all over again. There was something that just didn’t fit. Instead we have tried to engage the works in a clearer dialogue with one another than has been done before. We’ve had to take many works away to create a calmer composition. We like people to pause at a work rather than rush on to the next one. 

We work separately, with one exception, the work Due (Dove). It’s a photo of a dead pigeon that lay outside the Sandefjord Art Society. In that photograph we managed to capture the ambivalence we seek in our work. 

 

The theme is after all death, but we like to get some lightness into the exhibition too. That’s why we brought in a few older works, for example the videos with the ladies dancing with the exercise hoops. That makes it less of a one-track thing. 

 

As I understand it, this is your second exhibition together, and then comes another one, so they form a trilogy, one could perhaps say. For each exhibition you have also produced a book, which is a work of art in its own right. Can you talk about them? 

 

C: Yes, the next book and exhibition has a venue but not a title yet. It will take place in 2026, and by then we will have worked together for ten years. When we work with the books, each contributor is allowed to leave a clue that they send on to the next person. A bit like the paper chase games we played when we were small. We’re very interested in the way things move when you pass something on to someone else. It’s generous and fine to be together in something. 

 

Yes, the business with cycles is something that recurs. 

C: It’s great fun not knowing what it will become – there’s an unpredictabilty there. Cycles are very clear in nature, and we both have a lot of natural elements in our pictures. In nature there’s room for metaphors and ideas that can be understood immediately and don’t necessarily need to be explained so clearly.

M: The cycles recur in many of the projects. For example I’ve worked with the seasons throughout a whole year, with recurring periods of dark and light – the way nature is also present in us human beings as a kind of mental landscape. 

 

Can you tell me more about how you work? 

 

M: When I start a project I usually know what it will be about, and I lay down a clear framework for how I am to work with it. Within that framework I can permit myself to work very freely. At some point it may be that I have to reassesss the work and see whether the project has become something else. I try to let it develop. 

 

I feel so close to everything I lost began with me avoiding social media and my smartphone for a whole year. I wanted to get rid of distractions, like when you just pick up the mobile and scroll with no plan. Those times I had the impulse to pick up the phone on a whim, I picked up the camera instead. I registered the scene around me, and took a picture. That way I took control of my bad habit.

 

What happened when you weaned yourself off the smartphone and social media?

 

Gradually it became clear that it wasn’t about social media, or switching off, because I very quickly got used to not letting myself be distracted by my smartphone. It just took a couple of months. What happened was that I gained a different presence. That changed the way I see my surroundings, and the way I take photographs. Now it’s more about the great silence, the closeness to nature and to the people close to me, but that too requires silence, which becomes a magnifying glass for one’s own feelings. 

Norwegian Art yearbook

“In my eyes, the presentation of Marie Sjøvold’s photo book The Practice of Presence was Le Book Club’s most refreshing element. Among other things, it was about the experience perspective that both the book and the installation of the book opened up for; a perspective that is strikingly unexplored in the photobook literature. ”
— Heidi Bahle Amundsen in Norwegian Art Yearbook 2020

Heidi Bahle Amundsen has written a really good text about the exhibition “Le Book Club” in the Norwegian Art Yearbook. The exhibition was shown at Fotogalleriet in Oslo January/February 2020, curated by the Norwegian artist Nina Strand and Paris-based duo Anna Planas and Pierre Hourquet. In five chapters unravelling over five weeks, the exhibition Le Book Club explored the photobook as an exhibition space.

From Heidi Bahle Amundsens text in Norwegian:

I mine øyne var presentasjonen av Marie Sjøvolds fotobok The Practice of presence Le Book Clubs mest forfriskende element. Det handlet blant annet om det erfaringsperspektivet som både boken og installasjonen av boken åpnet opp for; et perspektiv som er påfallende uutforsket i fotoboklitteraturen. Sjøvold bok består av fire publikasjoner i en boks, som hver beskriver nærværserfaringer fotografen hadde i løpet av et år med begrenset bruk av smarttelefon og sosiale medier. Dette nærværet i egen erfaringsverden ble speilet i publikums omgang med boka, siden fire ulike installasjoner av verket inviterte til fire ulike opplevelser. 

Blant annet ble man som leser invitert til å legge igjen hver av de fire delene av The Practice of Presence åpne på det oppslaget man hadde opplevd sterkest, som ble neste lesers inngang til prosjektet. Interessant nok var det ikke disse oppslagene som satt sterkest i meg etter utstillingen, men de som andre hadde åpnet for meg. Den erfaringen sier noe om betydningen av andre leseres blikk og meninger for leseropplevelsen.

From Heidi Bahle Amundsens text translated to English:

In my eyes, the presentation of Marie Sjøvold's photo book The Practice of Presence was Le Book Club's most refreshing element. Among other things, it was about the experience perspective that both the book and the installation of the book opened up for; a perspective that is strikingly unexplored in the photobook literature. Sjøvold book consists of four publications in one box, each of which describes the photographer's presence experiences during a year with limited use of smartphone and social media. This presence in one's own world of experience was reflected in the audience's interaction with the book, since four different installations of the work invited four different experiences.

Among other things, the reader was invited to leave each of the four parts of The Practice of Presence open on the post they had experienced most, which became the next reader's entrance to the project. Interestingly enough, it was not these postings that stood out the most in me after the exhibition, but the ones that others had opened for me. That experience says something about the importance of other readers' views and opinions for the reading experience.

Berlingske: Here they are! The best and most debated art exhibitions of the year

The duo exhibition "The past in front of me" that Astrid Kruse Jensen and I had at Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen has been nominated by Berlingske's art editor Birgitte Ellemann Höegh as one of the best exhibitions in Denmark in 2021. The exhibition is curated by Kristine Kern.

Thank you for the invitation and cooperation.

You can read the article here:

https://www.berlingske.dk/kunst/her-er-de-aarets-bedste-og-mest-omdiskuterede-kunstudstillinger

And the full review here:

https://www.berlingske.dk/kunst/der-er-noget-naer-magisk-paa-faerde-i-fotografisk-center

We are in very good company. The other nominated exhibitions are:

  1. Efter stilheden – kunstens kvinder tager ordet at Statens Museum for Kunst

  2. Rugile Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelytė: at Copenhagen Contemporary

  3. Mamma Andersson: »Humdrum Days« at Louisiana

  4. Trine Søndergaard: »Works« at Den Sorte Diamant

  5. Anne Imhof: »Sex« at Statens Museum for Kunst

  6. Laure Provoust: »Our elastic arm hold in tight through the clouds« at Kunsthal Charlottenborg

  7. Marie Sjøvold og Astrid Kruse Jensen: »Fortiden foran mig« at Fotografisk Center

  8. David Lynch: »Infinite Deep« at Nikolaj Kunsthal

  9. »Kirchner og Nolde til diskussion« at Statens Museum For Kunst

  10. Randi Jørgensen og Katrine Malinovsky at Kofoeds Skole

So nice that the exhibition can live on into 2022!

Slutten // Opening speech at Sandefjord Kunstforening

Åpningstale til «Slutten» ved Sandefjord Kunstforening 9. oktober 2021

Der én ting slutter, begynner en annen.

I utstillingen «Slutten» møter vi to kunstnerskap, som har utviklet seg over tid og har hvert sitt særpreg, men som også har utviklet seg i samspill med hverandre. Når vi ser arbeidene utstilt sammen trer flere fellestrekk frem. Både Charlotte Thiis-Evensen og Marie Sjøvold er tett på hverdagen og knytter den til eksistensielle spørsmål: en kropp bryter overflaten og beveger seg inn i et ukjent rom; en datter snakker med sin far om hans uhelbredelige sykdom. Begge kunstnerskapene kjennetegnes også av et blikk for det poetiske i dagliglivet: Mønsteret i en furustamme; lyset som treffer en hånd (eller er det en flamme?) Arbeidene gir oss innblikk i menneskers liv. Og vi kjenner oss igjen.

Denne utstillingen er andre del i en trilogi, som startet med utstillingen «Oppvåkning». Det slår meg at den er blitt mer enn summen av to separate kunstnerskap. Den er blitt en samtale. Verkene snakker sammen, de kommenterer og utdyper hverandre. De gir hverandre nye lag.

Der jeg slutter, begynner du.

Samtalen mellom Charlotte og Marie startet for mer enn åtte år siden. Charlotte lagde en reportasje om søvn og intervjuet Marie. Jeg har latt meg fortelle at da intervjuet var ferdig, sa Charlotte: Jeg har fått en utstillingsplass, vil du stille ut sammen med meg? Og der startet samtalen dem imellom.

Flere års arbeid har ledet frem til denne utstillingen. Det handler om å utforske dokumentariske prosesser, utfordre tradisjonelle arbeidsmetoder og bli kjent med mennesker over tid: Komme nær de menneskelige erfaringene gjennom det kunstneriske arbeidet. Først var planen å stille ut i forskjellige rom, mer som to parallelle separatutstillinger. Så kom ideen om å blande verkene, og slik trer dialogene tydeligere frem.

I utstillingen har begge kunstnerne med arbeider fra ulike faser i kunstnerskapet. Et felles verk er også med, det første de har laget sammen: Et fotografi av en due. Og apropos det poetiske i hverdagen, duen fant de utenfor denne bygningen, på vei ut fra det første planleggingsmøtet her i Sandefjord kunstforening.

Verkene i utstillingen viser oss at slutten har mange ansikter. I noen er slutten en lengre, uunngåelig prosess, i andre en brå og uventet hendelse. Vi blir vitne til personlige utvekslinger om sykdom eller død. Andre verk peker på det språket vi mangler i møte med døden, de utforsker begravelsesblomster, de blomstene som skal si noe for oss når vi mangler ord. Andre igjen viser at elegansen og leken også hører alderdommen til, enten det består i å trene med rokkering i en grønn eng eller blåse enorme rosa tyggegummibobler. Vi får også se bevegelsene og forvandlingene som oppstår når noe avsluttes og noe nytt kan begynne. Som portrettene av gamle furustammer som oversettes til nye fremstillinger. I den gamle stammen ligger kimen til nye portretter. Eller kropper som beveger seg inn i ukjente rom, enten de bryter barrierer, eller driver mot noe de foreløpig ikke vet hva er. Slutten er en fase som bærer med seg nye begynnelser. Og med det nye syn på verden, og nye mulige fellesskap.

Dialogen mellom Charlotte og Marie har også ledet frem til en bok med tittelen Slutten. Omslaget er vårgrønt, boka har japansk binding og er håndsydd av kunstnerne selv. I boka har de invitert inn andre til samtalen: Eivind Hofstad Evjemo, Sverre Malling og Erik Pirolt. Dialogen blir en slags stafett, hvor hvert bidrag slutter med et spor til nestemann – en tekst, et fotografi, en tegning – noe å bygge videre på.

Der én slutter, tar den andre over.

Arbeidene i disse rommene får oss til å tenke over vår egen virkelighet. Og her kan enda en samtale begynne. Jeg ser for meg at fortellingene i denne utstillingen smelter sammen med våre egne, og lever videre i oss. Og når vi endrer oss, så ser jeg for meg at de endrer seg med oss.

Der én samtale slutter, kan en ny begynne.

Jeg er så glad for å få åpne denne utstillingen. Jeg er sikker på at den vil åpne for mange nye og givende samtaler. Tusen takk – og gratulerer!

Nina M. Schjønsby