“Hvor mye stillhet tåler du? rommer en påpekning av at minner er konstruerte bilder, og rokker ved grunnlaget for forestillingene om oss selv og verden rundt oss.”
READ THE REVIEW HERE
“Står jeg overfor fragmenterte minner, tapte muligheter, eller kanskje en ønskedrøm? Opplevelsen av at det her er snakk om noe forgangent, er særlig sterk i møte med to sammenkrøllede foto i stort format som ligger henslengt på gulvet.”
IN ENGLISH:
REVIEW by Tuva Mossin in Kunstkritikk.no, 07.06.23
Granddad, maybe?
Marie Sjøvold’s holiday idyll is a New Wave-like balancing act between seductive intimacy and a chilly remark on the constructed character of memory.
Summer arrives late in Bergen this year, but in Marie Sjøvold’s exhibition at Gyldenpris Kunsthall in Bergen you get an intimate and warm hint of the idyll that is fast approaching: sea urchins, bare feet, trickling mountain streams and bare, suntanned skin. In How Much Silence Can You Take? you are met with still images of people in all the situations you typically associate with cottage life in Norwegian nature.
How Much Silence Can You Take?
Marie Sjøvold
Gyldenpris Kunsthall, Oslo
25 May 2023 – 10 June 2023
The airy presentation suits Sjøvold’s snapshots as it encourages a more intimate approach to each of the individual pictures, which in turn are intimate and warm depictions of what is apt to interpret as a family. If you zoom out there is nevertheless something distant and impersonal about its entirety. The people are consistently facing away from the camera, or their faces fall outside the frame. The personal and the intimate in the skin and hair can as such be read as something general, almost archetypical: the child becomes «the child», the mother «the mother» and the father «the father» who live an idealized cottage life at the sea – almost too good to be true. And as I think just that, I become aware of a fleeting quality about the images.
Am I faced with fragmented memories, lost opportunities, or maybe a wishful dream? The feeling that this is about something bygone is especially strong when you reach two crumpled photos in a large format that lie as if thrown on the floor. They show scenes from the same summery reality but the presentation doesn’t let me read these pictures as direct snapshots in the same way as the other photos. This topic is reprised in the final part of the exhibition, where small variants of the crumpled photos are displayed in a small group. But here they are encased in glass and raised on pedestals – like little transparent containers of memories the artist doesn’t want to lose. The memory boxes are framed on one side by a wall-mounted photo of a man – granddad, maybe? – in water to his knees launching a miniature sailboat in the sea.
Two pictures hanging by strings from the ceiling stand out. They are white prints made by 3D-printing photos and pressing them against paper. You have to get up close to discern the subjects: a swimming figure and two hands holding each other. The prints are the very last thing you seem, and they end the exhibition with a hint that new stories are on their way. The vague traces of the photos of which the prints are restorations is a subtle problematization of the exhibition’s other, more conventional images, in that a parallel is implied between the processes of the camera and those of memory. How Much Silence Can You Take? points out that memories are constructed images and shakes at the foundation of our images of ourselves and the world around us.
How Much Silence Can You Take?
Marie Sjøvold
Gyldenpris Kunsthall, Oslo
25 May 2023 – 10 June 2023