Randi Samsonsen (1977)
When will you see you like I do
2022
Wool, steel, wood, cardboard, metal
Technique: crochet

In 2022, art critic Kinna Poulsen wrote the following about Randi Samsonsen’s installations, which at the time were on display in grocery shops nationwide: 

Kinna Poulsen, Listaportal 2022:

"... the sculptures are soft and seem simultaneously simple and complex, concrete and abstract, cosy and mysterious. The medium feels somewhat banal and evocative of childhood and crocheted pot holders while at the same time, the artwork, with its brash non-functionality and monumental size, is clearly something other and more than cosy. Instead it seems imposing and full of unvoiced questions. Materially, it is about the weave, the tactile aspect of crochet, how we sense the material, how our skin remembers the crocheted surface. The material also presents a contrast to the mass produced materials otherwise in the grocery shop, which for the most part consist of cardboard, plastic, and metal.

By installing the artworks inside a grocery shop and other places which we don’t typically associate with anything artistic, the artist hopes to make us stop and break out of our automatic thinking while we’re shopping. Though the subject matter is not a political protest against capitalism, the medium still elicits thoughts of the political, anti-materialistic 1970’s. The artist loses a little bit of control of her works when they are installed in a space that is unassociated with art, which lacks the support of an artistic environment and the rituals that characterise it. To lose oversight is not so bad, according to Randi Samsonsen; it teaches her about the capabilities of the artwork, viewer and herself, and this is liberating, she says. The same sort of candidness is felt in the title, ‘When will you see yourself like I do?’. This is an open question which can be multi-directional; either it’s a philosophical existential question the viewer asks the sculpture, or it’s the sculpture that asks it of the viewer..."

Jóhan Martin Christiansen (1987)
Jeppe Sleeping
2023-24
Copper etchings in frames, sheet

“Something else that remains unknown”

by Maša Tomšič

Desire is ingrained in the history of lovers, and of bodies. To be honest, it was implicit also in the attempts of writing this text. The desire for this text to be; and also, to be about desire. But then, since everything – text, bodies… especially bodies, and also lovers – has been progressively thrown out there, given to the exteriority, including the often-autocratic public stage and the consequential, unavoidable politicization, it became unclear: Does it still make sense to talk about desire?

Not simply because it was turned – like so much of everything else – into a reduction, in form of either a product, a commodity, or one of those quantifying measures that sustain identities. Rather, the hesitancy with regard to the matter of desire came up due to another issue: the difficulty in finding, or recognizing, the remaining spaces of true intimacy.

Back in 1991, several billboards across New York City were showing a large photo of the empty bed of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (supposedly his actual bed). The kind of image we all know, and very likely have similar snapshots of. With crumpled bedsheets, the imprinted traces of two heads on the pillows, the implication of the past presence of bodies, the signs of the remains of sleep and of similar mysterious nocturnal states and activities. In sum, a glimpse into the private life, the life of two. Those others – other people, other lovers – whom we’ll never know, however much familiar and quotidian the sight is, and however many identical photos we might have ourselves.

Of course, the point there was political. As it perhaps – then – had to be. It was through the said intimate familiarity of the scene, exposed abruptly through its scale and positioning, that the absence of the bodies was made visible and felt, stressing the problem of their disappearance. That is, their death.

Death: another common thread in the fates of bodies and of lovers.

Fast-forward to now.

In Jeppe Sleeping, the bed is again full.

However, before reading this as yet another political move (yes, the political likes to be clingy when it comes to moves in the history of queer gestures), let’s assume that life precedes politics, and not vice versa. Instead of absence, we now have presence. A presence that is marked and corporeal – in the several senses of both words. Seen from this perspective, Jeppe Sleeping does begin like a statement: all the more so since any line has the capacity to stand as a statement, by being an inscription, exteriorization, affirmation. But here, although produced with the proclamatory act of inscribing, the motion of incision, assertion through applied pressure, the work nevertheless takes a slightly different turn.

Behind it, there is still a gesture that engraves presence through force and intervention into the materiality of surfaces, revealing bare hapticity, made unapologetic through the restless, deconstructing implementation of the line. Yet, it is a gesture that comes from and aims at the domain of the intimate, therefore acquiring a form that is subtle, tactful, and succeeds in presenting as discreet. Also, fundamentally sensorial: the feeling of the countless threads mixed with the hair, mixed with the wrinkles of the fabrics and the skin, the palpable tissues, epidermic creases and loose limbs mingled into a delicately knotty synesthetic amalgam.

By bringing the lover’s body back, Jeppe Sleeping doesn’t merely counter absence with presence, with the intent to suggest a new narrative, as a solution of an opposition to death, or any related politicizing. Instead, it delineates a pulsating life, through the unassuming sensoriality of an unassuming portrait: not only Jeppe’s, but potentially of anyone’s – so familiar yet so evasive – intimacy.

Here comes the curious part: despite being so manifestly tactile – in everything: its medium, its process, and its motif – it ultimately touches on ungraspability.

…Ungraspability of the tangible?

A detour as a parallel: If you ever read Marguerite Duras’ – conveniently titled – Lover, you might recall how it’s more about death than about love. Well, in short, it’s about life. And the latter, she writes, seemingly paradoxically, can only be immortal while it’s still alive and being lived. Immortality is not really a question of time, duration, a beginning and an end, or even a question of immortality itself as one would think, but a question of ‘something else that remains unknown’.

Remaining unknown. This is where the tangible can be ungraspable. And it’s also where to locate the persisting space of intimacy: between the tangled folds of the sheets, under the endless layers of the skin, behind the ever-slippery presence of a body, within the other’s singular interiority, at the center of desire, inaccessible, in Jeppe’s sleep.

— June 2024

Maibritt Marjunardóttir (1988)
Anhedonia
2024
VHS tape

Sound: Heðin Ziska Davidsen
Thanks: Strandamáling / Mentanargrunnur Landsins

Turið Nolsøe, "Conceptualising material salvation" (2024):

 

"...Both in her art and her design Marjunardóttir explores affective-material expansion; how can time and devotion generate value, how are emotions to be incorporated into materials which are then transformed into art, either for viewing or wearing.

“Anhedonia” is a physical manifestation of emotional states; it is affective salvation knitted from the vhs-tapes of others, tied to a need to create the ability to experience pleasure again. The audience is invited into the compressed, dark, hard place which these knitted scraps of salvation represent.

The slippery material is tempting because it is sharp. The material is black and open. The material consists of innumerable hours of footage, which no one knows what depicts. Marjunardóttir’s abstract shapes are figurative in their specific origin as documentation of lived or performed lives, and the artwork thus frolics on the border between the symbolic and straight-forward material. Anhedonia makes you feel, know emotions, be they pleasurable or not.
Let this darkness feel good.

“Anhedonia” is the fourth iteration of Marjunardóttir’s conceptualisation of vhs-tapes as material salvation and is created within the space which houses it. Together with Heðin Ziska Davidsen, Marjunardóttir has taped the sonic side of this material development which also functions as space’s soundscape..."

Ragnhild Hjalmarsdóttir Højgaard (1982)
Block Chain
2023-24
Woven faroese wool in the five natural colours

 

The blockchain refers to a digital system where objects can be given a unique identity. The object can be anything; a digital currency, an apple, or a ball of yarn. As the item moves through a chain - or thread - every move is registered, ensuring that the same original item is tracked on its way. This makes it possible to follow the object from its origin to its end, ensuring transparency.

The art installation “Block Chain” is a material manifestation of the blockchain concept. The piece is handwoven in the five faroese natural wool colors: white, fair gray, dark gray, fair brown, and dark brown. Each color runs from beginning to end, changing every time it meets another color. This simple logic, where one thread meets another, forms a system that makes it possible to track the origin of the five colors and how they merge into 25 unique color combinations.

In this way, connections are made between tactile reality and the digital realm, the near and the distant, as well as between the past and present.

Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir (1997)
An attempt not to write in brakets
2024
Text, tracing paper, plastic

Faroese translation: Rakul Jónheðinsdóttir Tróndheim            
English proofreading: Klara Asta Kirk
Layout: Billa Jenný Jónleifsdóttir

Thanks to: Annika Klæmintsdóttir Olsen, Grug Muse, Jane Jin Kaisen, Kirstin Helgadóttir, Maibritt Borgen, Maria Guldbrandsøe Tórgarð, Noah Holtegaard, Oscar Lyons, Tilda Lundbohm, Turið Nolsøe og Vinícius Maffei.

Turið Nolsøe, 2024:

Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir: “An attempt not to write in brackets” (2024) Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir’s piece “An attempt not to write in brackets” is generated partially by a speech-to-text program to which Eyðunardóttir has dictated her own thoughts. The piece is a reflection on how Faroese language does not accommodate conversations on abortion; how it carries too much shame, too much resistance to acknowledging that abortion exists in the Faroe Islands and in Faroese. Can AI get the conversation going? Hey Google, how do we disentangle the societal problem which abortion represents in the Faroe Islands?

In addition to the words, Eyðunardóttir uses granny knots (kellingaknútar in Faroese) as representations of the bracketed tangles in Faroese society. Vacuum-packed textile, threads, which cover words, obscuring what can be read and said: “)However, if you know it’s a “kellingaknútur”, you can pull one of the ropes against yourself and the force of physics will loosen up the knot and dissolve it, the bracketing.(“The granny knots tie the piece together as a critique of a deadlocked situation which ought to be solved, and together with the text “An attempt not to write in brackets” emphasizes the limits of developing artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence rarely benefits minority languages (we just do not generate enough value for the companies who own the programs), so we must create the platform which generates Faroese conversations about abortion ourselves. But does a conversation have to be in Faroese to qualify as Faroese? Or are translation and migration between languages and countries part of what is most essentially Faroese?

Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir (b. 1997, Faroe Islands) is a visual artist and an MFA student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark. Last year, she was enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, USA as well as the Fondazione Studio Rizoma mentorship program in Palermo, Italy. She has been featured in several exhibitions in the Faroe Islands, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and the US. Her work is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands.