Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

Over the years its state of abandon – which may be considered
the exact opposite of the non-place concept of French
anthropologist Marc Augè – suggested various new uses for the
hill, including a hotel complex and meditation centre.
Such a concentration of events, according to the artist,
brings the very concept of ruin into discussion. The objects that
belonged to this place and bore witness to its history are so
charged with memory that they may be considered saturated
and returned to nature, thereby absolving the last function left
to them, as custodians of memory and a vehicle for healing.
Photography, in Engh’s creative universe, is an investigative
narrative form which the artist uses to relate time and history,
keeping track in a single image of the different moments and
different events that have characterised places and objects,
enabling us to achieve a new perspective. Engh’s work, which
inevitably becomes the protagonist of this narrative process, is
seen in an archaeological perspective that tends to examine the
various stratifications involved and their spirit.
His art pushes far beyond a simple, albeit intense,
documentation of the place and its scenarios towards a full grasp
of the subjects of his quest. Engh does this by creating clones
of the original, thereby establishing new points of view and new
conceptions of the “things” that belong to reality and experience.
This process of re-creation of what is real is an evident
attempt to scan precisely the spirit and history that objects
carry with them, as well as a simultaneous attempt to abstract
them from their original context and exhibit them in fresh
circumstances by seeking out their unexpressed potential.
By reproducing objects taken from everyday life and highlighting
some of their formal aspects, Engh achieves a transposition of
the meaning of the chosen subject, managing to shift attention
in a simple gesture from historical and “archaeological” detail to
formal detail, assimilating these objects – even if in this stage
of Engh’s artistic process it would be better to define them as
forms – into artistic currents such as Minimalism.
This mode leads the artist, through interpretation of the
meanings and functions that objects have inherited over time,
towards the attainment of their essential form. In this way, the
object is stripped of all its acquired superstructures and we are
left with the form itself, which provides us with an opportunity to
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reflect on the systematic and standardised aspects of daily life.
Observers thus find themselves faced by pure form that has
lost the characteristic of giving or withholding information, to
become an abstract concept and synthesis of itself. This opens
up for a series of different and diversified interpretations that
re-adapt the reality to which the object refers.
The displacement that the artist manages to create between
the initial input and the formal result is particularly evident in
one of his latest shows: Lycanthropic Chamber. The monster
(the werewolf referred to in the title) seems to have completely
disappeared from the scene, leaving hardly a trace. The works
on show seem to be innocuous geometric forms that once again
echo Minimalism and Modernism. Where is the ferocious beast,
this slave to the full moon, with its characteristically dramatic
and fearful howls? In which of the essential and dry forms of
works such as Pinstripes (2008) – a triangular steel grid where
different geometric motifs are repeated; or Hotel California
(2008) – a wall comprising two semi-transparent sheets making
that which appears behind the partition seem as if wrapped in a
slight mist, is the lycanthrope hiding?
The image suggested by the title of the exhibition is in reality
a metaphor of wildness, of the slave to passions who regresses
to the primitive nature of his origins, a metaphor of Man
enacting violence against others, of the sadism and masochism
latent in human nature.
An essential and summary example is the work entitled
Gulfstream V 1–4 (2007): four framed documents,
complemented with four almost identical images of the aircraft
mentioned in the title and four signatures at the bottom.
The work was inspired by a news item in the Washington
Post about the way in which some prisoners of war from
Afghanistan and Iraq are taken to US bases in countries
where the US legal system is not applied, thereby allowing
for methods of interrogation other than those envisaged
by US legislation. All data about the prisoners and the
people involved in transport is false or can only be traced to
anonymous mail boxes. The transformation of the individual
from subject to object is total; the elimination of his identity
sums up the capacity of Man, through self-negation, to merge
with his brutal nature.