After Vertigo – Passing Presence

The visual artists Viel Bjerkeset Andersen and Rita Jokiranta are working together with an exhibition project and will show their own entities in the exhibition UnRealities in July in Forum Box. The crucial elements in the exhibition are video installations which will be completed with photographs and installations. Bjerkeset Andersen and Jokiranta explore both the transient border of existence; they research the relation- ship between dream/nightmare and reality, the thin layer between being and not being; they try to find out the fragility of the border zones and how it feels to lose the grip, how easy it is to get everything crashed or how fear or alienation may take over.
The exhibition is developed to an entity around these themes, which are getting to be everyday-questions in the world we now live, where nothing anymore seems to last forever, where confidence has been replaced by confusion, the party is turned to a tragedy, and where all our security nets are close to break. And we are caught by dizziness at the edge of the unknown.

Reviewed by Bertil Sundstedt, extract, Norrbottens Kuriren 30.11.2010:
“St Francis loved all God’s creation and they loved him. According to legend, St Francis preached to the lowly sparrows that were silent when he spoke. The sparrow and particularly the house sparrow is a Christian symbol of humility. It becomes reiterated, like most things in life, when the Christian ‘agape’, unselfish love meets Eros’s physical love- since, in Greek mythology, the same bird is, the love God, Aphrodite’s bird.
The Sparrow has the lead role in Viel Bjerkeset Andersen’s interesting installation, Prelude for Eternity- Transitory Circuits, in hall 1 at Luleå Art Gallery. It is a work that that reminds us of our mortality; a preview, to borrow a metaphor from Karl Vennberg, of the mute eternity we all will retire to. A stuffed, seemingly submissive, house sparrow lies with spread wings on small, suspended, bottom lit alter. There is something imploring about the body position, as if it’s begging for its life. Several loudspeakers are suspended around the small alter, that are connected to motion detectors that are activated when visitors move in the room.
Various sounds and voices stream from the loudspeakers, ebbing and flowing as they create a changeable field of sound that we with our very presence contribute to. It becomes a symbol for something that is changeable and transient, as ephemeral as the smoke whirl shapes, laser cut in metal, try to immortalize in the work, Transitory moments- Drop, Blow, Contact, that hangs on one of the halls’ short walls. Life as smoke, an illusion that Hinduism describes with the image of Maya’s veils, a game, that hides a true identity behind apparent diversity.
This thought lies close to Neo-Platonism and therefore the church and St Francis. Andersen’s contribution in this two part exhibition, that is now showing at the art gallery, is called Prelude for Eternity- Transitory Circuits and it alludes to life’s transitory nature and our powerlessness with regard to eternity, while to a certain extent she exposes language and art’s inability concerning the portrayal of the unfathomable. ….”
(Translated from Swedish by Peter Speed)