MARGOT WALLARD

I have an image that’s been on mind for many years. And I’m so fascinated by this image that I have it on the wall in my house. (I rarely put pictures on the wall). 

It’s an archive family picture, a portrait of my grandparents when they were young in Algeria.

Archive pictures are attractive for obvious reasons, which is why I’m often wary of them. But this one is like an obsession for me. When I first saw it years ago, I was blown away and I still am whenever I look at it. 

This is because it’s my grandparents from a time I never knew. 

Because they seem foreign and yet so familiar to me.

Because it’s about the passage of time.

Because it’s about them as a couple as I’ve never known them. 

Because it’s about them. How they pose in front of the camera.

Because it’s not only an old picture, it’s a magic picture. A magic moment. 

ALEX PRAGER

One Image by Nina Strand:

The idea of the recently published book The Photograph That Changed My Life is simple: over 50 photographers, musicians, collectors and actors are invited to ‘write from the heart’, as editor Zelda Cheatle explains in the blurp, about the most important photograph they have seen. Contributors include Adam Bromberg, Nan Goldin and David George.

The American photographer Alex Prager chose this still from Neša Paripović’s film N.P. 1977, in which the artist depicts his walk through Belgrade, as he moves with swift determination, taking shortcuts to get to wherever he is headed as fast as he can. The film was shown at Trondheim Kunsthall some years ago, and as the press release states, Paripović ‘uses the city as a mirror in which individual identity is constructed’. Prager writes that, having just begun producing scenes that walk a line between reality and artifice, she finds in this shot of Paripović’s leap across rooftops ‘the perfect balance of a meticulously staged scenario joined with the raw and wild’.

For this column, where every writer describes an image that they find impossible to get out of their mind, I’ve chosen this still, because it keeps me hanging on after having closed the book. This jump could end tragically, and those who haven’t seen the film don’t know the outcome. The uncertainty reminds me of the fate of the 75-year-old French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin, who recently died while attempting to row across the Atlantic Ocean. Savin, who had crossed the ocean before in a large barrel, described the trip as a way to ‘laugh at old age’.

I was rooting for him to make the trip, since it would be a beautiful statement on the fact that age doesn’t matter. And even though he failed, it still is, since anyone could have died in the same conditions. Seen in this light, Paripović’s jump and hasty tour of the city also become a salute to the fact that anything is possible in any part of one’s life. 

HENNI ALFTAN

One Image by Alina Vergnano:

Time has gone weird lately. Or at least, something has changed in the way I perceive its passage. Its velocity goes in waves: days go fast, and faster, and then suddenly they slow down, as if the hours were on the verge of stopping, only to start racing again. When I think about this elastic movement, my mind keeps returning to Henni Alftan and her series of diptychs, Déjà vu, and in particular to one: Haircut (Déjà vu).

Henni Alftan, Haircut (Déjà-vu), 2020, oil on canvas; 2 parts, Courtesy KARMA, New York.

What draws my mind, and eyes, to this image, is its simultaneous depiction of time passing and time standing still. When I look at those scissors with a straight cascade of chestnut hair in between the shiny blades, I feel the stillness evoked by the precise brushstrokes, but also a soft pull to the moment coming next. It is not the tug of a far-removed future, but still, it is future. These two canvases bring me back to a haunting childhood question: what do we miss when our eyes blink? In my mind, the void left between the two images is filled by a sound, a snip. Something has unequivocally occurred; it is something subtle, yet radical. The scissors have closed and the hair has fallen, even if we missed the moment when it happened.

In my own work, time and change are central and, when I paint or draw, my main preoccupation is how to preserve their flowing nature. Things tend to happen fast and fluidly in my studio, and I normally respond more to images that are somehow similar to mine in nature. But the eerie, quasi-stillness in Alftan’s work is magnetic to me. It is like watching a very very thin still, distilling our days. It is disturbing, but I can’t stop looking.

ANNE IMHOF

Anne Imhof, Untitled (Wave), 2021.

One Image by Nina Strand:

One image still on my mind from last year – one remaining among a surprisingly high number of exhibitions held during another year of the pandemic – is from the 2021 video Untitled (Wave) by Anne Imhof. It was exhibited in the cellar of Palais de Tokyo during Imhof’s grand exhibition Natures Mortes, part of the annual Carte Blanche programme. The exhibition was scheduled to open in March 2020 but was postponed due to the various lockdowns.

Anne Imhof, Untitled (Wave), 2021.

The film depicts the artist’s collaborator Eliza Douglas on a beach, dressed only in a pair of trousers, whip in hand, contemplating the waves rolling in, sometimes lashing out at them. Her hair is loose, her body is free. Having walked through Imhof’s halls of mirrors and studied her works, as well as those of other invited artists, this one stood out. Who wouldn’t like to beat the waves at this point? The woman’s repetitive whipping movements seemed cathartic. It made me think about how the pandemic can be used as a reset. Enough is enough. 

I thought about the video again when I read Anne Berest’s editorial in the French magazine Madame, the supplement of Le Figaro, about how she writes all the time, working whenever there is a window. She calls this the luxury of freedom, and reflects on how it sets a good example for her daughters, showing them the joy of working and having a larger project in life. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. It’s taken me years to learn to devote myself to my work, to learn how to say no without feeling I need to give a lot of excuses and explanations. Reading the text made me think of Douglas whipping the waves. She has this freedom. Berest has it. I want it too.  

RUGILE BARZDZIUKAITE, VAIVA GRAINYTE & LINA LAPELYTE

Exhibition view: Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte, Lina Lapelyte, Sun Sea (Marina), Opera-performance, Lithuania Pavilion, Magazzino No. 42, Marina Militare, Arsenale di Venezia, Fondamenta Case Nuove 2738, The 58th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia 'May You Live in Interesting Times' (11 May–24 November 2019). © Andrej Vasilenko.

One image by Nina Strand:

There’s no way back now. Everything is dark around us. I’m not scared – of course I’m not scared – but wait, what was that? It’s just that it’s the middle of the night and we’re walking on the subway tracks underneath the streets of Oslo to find an art exhibition of my friend. The subways stop running at midnight. But do they really? Are we safe? Am I a coward to make my date walk in front of me? We both jump when something moves close to our feet. Of course, rats live down here. We’re entering their territory. Voluntarily! I’ve promised him a great performance - I can feel his restlessness and wonder if we should just walk back to where we went down and go on a more normal date. But I know I’ll have FOMO forever if I don’t see it, so I keep going.

This brings back the memory of traversing Venice on my final day at the Biennale in 2019 to find the Lithuanian pavilion for an apparently unmissable opera performance, Sun and Sea (Marina). It took me forever to find the hall, and there was a long queue outside. In my eagerness to get in, I accidentally stepped on the feet of curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Only few people could be admitted at one time, and I was quick to take a photo of the installation before the rest of the group arrived up the small staircase. In hindsight I feel silly for taking out my cellphone – as if nothing exists without me documenting it. I just wanted to have an image without people in it. I did wonder if putting my phone immediately between myself and the work diminished my experience of it. I’m also ashamed to admit that I was too busy observing Obrist’s reaction to the opera, which was set on a stage resembling a crowded beach, to focus on it as closely as I should. But I ended up writing about the work after an interview with the curators. They deserved the coverage, and I filled in the gaps through research.

I still go and see everything I can. It’s never enough. The more I see, the more I want. And after the lockdowns, I want even more. That’s why we’re walking in the dark underneath Oslo. There are so many shows to see. So many pop-up galleries, artist-driven initiatives, all kinds of exhibitions with complicated structures that have taken years to develop but which get absolutely no press coverage. So many launches of books printed on special paper with fold-out posters. So many publications that are never reviewed. I wonder, if they’re never mentioned, do they exist? Is it worth it, all these shows and projects disappearing into darkness?

Every Norwegian newspaper is downscaling, only writing about exhibitions from the larger institutions that ‘everyone’ knows, not the small, often more interesting ones from less established artists. There are newspapers that have axed their art sections. So we begin promoting each other’s shows, in solidarity. We write long posts on social media. We send in commentaries to the papers in the absence of reviews, hiding in plain sight the information on the artwork we want to highlight. It becomes a kind of activism, something I laugh about while enviously eyeing all the journalists at press previews in Berlin, Paris, London, wondering which organisations they’re writing for. Do they really have that many papers and art journals? It feels as if visual art is more esteemed there than here. It’s a structural fail: schools have too little art education, artists are viewed as peculiar. Our Queen even pointed this out in an interview for Norwegian TV about her new gallery. There’s way too little arts coverage, she sternly announced. We hope for more. Norway has the highest amount of funding and grants for artists, but seemingly the lowest coverage. It doesn’t add up.

We never make it to the performance. We see a tiny staircase and my date looks expectantly at me. We’ve been walking aimlessly for an hour. We decide to get out to enjoy a warm bar and some wine. I later learn that my friend got absolutely no coverage for this project that had been three years in the making. This is all I can give her: a feeble attempt to say something about the shows that go by unnoticed. So, this is it. My walk in the dark.

JASMINA CIBIC

Jasmina Cibic, The Gift (still), 2021, three channel 4K video. Courtesy the artist

One Image by Lillian Davies:

In the early 1950s Stalin erected the Palace of Culture and Science in the center of Warsaw as a gift to the Polish people, newly part of his Soviet Union. There’s an Olympic-sized swimming pool inside the 42-floor tower, with a diving well and three platform boards. Jasmina Cibic’s three channel 4K video film, The Gift (2021) opens there, with sweeping color images and sounds of chlorinated water trickling through the drains. In her opening shots, three pre-adolescent girls, hair pulled back tight from their pale foreheads, walk one after another along the pool’s tiled edge. They are dressed to perform and to compete, wearing simple one-piece suits, two in navy blue, one in dark red. A stately piano melody and a cool female voice over accompanies them as they climb metal stairs and await one another at the top of the diving platforms. A dive, a front flip, and a pencil shaped plunge, the athletes pierce the calm surface of the crystal-clear water, finger tips first, or toes, at exactly the same moment, amplifying the cutting sound of a splash. Exuding youth, strength and beauty, like Zeus’s three muses, these young women embody ideals that are beyond themselves. Cibic filmed underwater, and seen from below, the moment they break the surface is like the burst of a firecracker, or three. For a split second after their plunge, they are unique, liberated, swimming slowly to the surface and an inevitable panel of judges.

Cibic’s newest film, unfolds primarily in Paris, inside the French Communist Party Headquarters, a gift from architect Oscar Niemeyer. Here, Cibic’s three male characters, “three gifts,” as she calls them, The Engineer, The Diplomat, and the most handsome, The Artist, played by Downtown Abbey’s Lachlan Nieboer, devise a plan: “We will organize a competition to determine the symbol of our renovated future.” And so it is, that each, speaking in turn of the ideological virtues of architecture, music and art, are put into competition to determine the gift that will appease and reunify an unnamed and divided nation. 

Four actresses play a cast of allegorical judges, referred to in Cibic’s narrative as the Four Fundamental Freedoms: from Fear, from Want, of Speech and of Worship (terms borrowed from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 speech aimed to spur American support for entry into World War II). The characters’ dramatic period hair, makeup and clothes — perfectly matched to Niemeyer’s 1971 construction date — are a contrast to the unadorned sobriety of Cibic’s three divers. Cibic’s judges’ polish and dress are reminders of the workings and power of spectacle, performances of gender, seduction and status, that fuel political debate and public opinion. The judges’ exchange begins as a sort of philosophical debate and quickly disintegrates into a battle of practical nonsense—jargon. 

It’s a jargon that sounds like art-speak or International Art English, as named in the brilliant Triple Canopy study, that eerily familiar language drained of meaning through translation, repetition and misunderstanding. Each line of Cibic’s script is ready-made, like her characters and soundtrack for this film, pulled from archives, transcriptions and recordings of politicians and artists speaking about the ideologies behind modern artworks:

“Art itself if a gift of the creative spirit.” 

“The artist is a political being: alert.” 

“Art is not made to decorate apartments. It is a weapon to be used against the enemy.”

Not only historical ready-mades, each element—script, music and sites—of Cibic’s The Gift was given as such. MAC Lyon curator Mathieu Lelièvre Lelièvre cites the French social anthropologist Marcel Mauss whose 1924 essay remains preeminent for studies of gift exchange. For Mauss, gift giving implies a social contract performed in public rituals. There’s a stage, costuming and choreography that Cibic forces us to see. Gift-giving can be a tool of soft power, a political and cultural phenomena she’s been exploring since her exhibition for the Slovenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990, shortly the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Nye, soft power implies “organizing an international agenda and structuring world politics by using resources of intangible power like culture, ideology and institutions.” Mobilizing art for political ends in other words, though sociologist Alexandre Kazerouni warns, in his recent paper, Musées and Soft Power in the Persian Gulf (2015), that Nye’s soft power is not economic power. It is the intellectual and ideological conception of an artwork that matters, not its market value. 

Though Cibic doesn’t mention him by name, Lewis Hyde’s eponymous book, first published in 1983, looms large. Hyde wrote as a poet, for other poets, searching for a history and meaning of gift giving, gift having, in a modern society founded on commercial exchange. His subtitle, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, reads like a line of Cibic’s ready-made script. As Margaret Atwood wrote recently in Paris Review, in his book, Hyde seems to be looking for a definition of the nature of art. “Is a work of art a commodity with a money value, to be bought and sold like a potato, or is it a gift on which no real price can be placed, to be freely exchanged?” Atwood asks. She proposes an answer in Hyde’s explorations, perhaps in her own work, something also glimpsed in Cibic’s cinematic ruminations: “Gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.” Stalin may have demanded the labor of ten thousand men to build his palace, but there is freedom in the water, in swimming under the surface. It’s Cibic’s triptych image of her divers’ splash, a sort of momentary escape, that stays in my mind, like a gift. 

Jasmina Cibic’s exhibition Stagecraft (featuring The Gift 2019-2021) is on view at MAC Lyon through January 2, 2022. 

Jasmina Cibic, The Gift (still), 2021, three channel 4K video. Courtesy the artist.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

One Image by Nina Strand:

Louise Bourgeois, who called herself a prisoner of her memories, was three years old when the First World War began, and moved from France to New York two years before the Second. She began to make her self-enclosed structures known as the Cells in 1989. The objects collected within them, which one can only view from the outside, all had a personal resonance and history: ‘Each “Cell” deals with the pleasure of the voyeur’,  said Bougeois in 1991, ‘the thrill of looking and being looked at. The “Cells” either attract or repulse each other. There is this urge to integrate, merge, or disintegrate.’ 

Louise Bourgeois, Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photo: Christopher Burke. Shown at Whitechapel Gallery.

Her work has been on my mind a great deal during the last two weeks. The day Putin decided to begin a war against Ukraine, I visited two exhibitions in London where one could see her cells: The Woven Child, at Hayward Gallery and A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920–2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery. The first is a retrospective with a focus exclusively on Bourgeois’ work using fabrics and textiles. The second is a survey of the studio through the work of over 80 artists. Featuring Bourgeois alongside contemporary artists such as Walead Beshty, Lisa Brice, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Mequitta Ahuja, the exhibition gives a peak into how an artist works. This grand survey also demonstrates how artists can and do make a change for the better in society, making one question whether an international ban on Russian artists is the right approach to take, especially since Putin himself silences those who speak against him. 

Today we live in a state of constant crisis, with conflicts being waged all over the world, millions of displaced refugees, and the aftermath of the pandemic. With this in mind, Bourgeois’ microcosms, described by Okwui Enwezor as works that ‘turn life inside out’, have extra resonance. The 'Cells' represent different types of pain, Bourgeois has explained: ‘The physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional? It's a circle going round and round.’

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks 008, 2018, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

One Image by Nina Strand:

In a currently closed Paris I saw Hiroshi Sugimoto’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, and I spent a long time looking at this beautiful blue work. It was a welcome escape from our lockdown situation.

Sugimoto’s subject matter include lifelike displays in museums of natural history, old American drive-in theaters as well as vast seascapes — as he has investigated time and memory throughout his practice. For him, photography functions as a system for saving memories, it is a time machine.

His current exhibition Theory of Colours at Marian Goodman consists of his new series Opticks. The title of this series is a reference to Sir Isaac Newton’s treatise Opticks, published in 1704. Opticks is according to Sugimoto essentially a series shot using a Polaroid camera, capturing the light that Newton refracted using a prism.

This new body of work is just as meditative as his seascapes. He has previously stated that photography is like a found object. That photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world. But not every photographer has the expertise in finding these ‘found objects’ as Sugimoto. 

Known for his precise techniques, long exposures and perfectly composed large format photographs — the philosophical and conceptual aspects of his ouvre is just as important. His photographs reveal the time passing, and the mediums unique ability to render a trace of it. 

The exhibition will open to the public as soon as the current lockdown is over. Meanwhile everyone can enjoy the virtual preview of the exhibition.

NICOLE EISENMAN, VANESSA BAIRD & LINN PEDERSEN

Nicole Eisenman, Destiny Riding Her Bike, 2020. Photo Thomas Widerberg. Astrup Fearnley Collection.

One Image by Nina Strand:

There's no place like home

On a painting, a drawing and a photograph.

The large painting Destiny Riding Her Bike by Nicole Eisenman has been on my mind since I saw it at the Astrup Fearnley Museum In Oslo a couple of weeks ago. A woman soars off her bike having crashed into a ladder set up against a tree, toppling a man who is trying to save the small cat that intently watches the chance meeting between the two humans. In the March issue of New Yorker, Eisenman explains the image in the article ‘Every Nicole Eisenman Picture Tells a Story’ by Ian Parker. ‘It’s a romantic painting of two people meeting. One is falling off a ladder, and the other is riding a bicycle into the ladder—and popping off the top of the bicycle. She’s flying through the air. And they kind of have their eyes locked on each other. I think it’s very romantic—a Douglas Sirk film still.’ Eisenman explains that the picture is connected to her recent relationship with the art critic and writer Sarah Nicole Prickett, and that the image became ‘this disaster happening, and a kind of romance inside this disaster’. In these days of isolation, I long to meet new people like this, romance or no romance.

Vanessa Baird, There's no place like home, 2020.

Eisenman has mentioned her admiration for the Norwegian artist Karl Ove Knausgaard, to whose project My Struggle Vanessa Baird’s work has been compared. Baird has just published her new book There's no place like home with autobiographical drawings of living with her kids and her mother. Some drawings are accompanied by notes written by her mother about her different needs, reflections and thoughts. When I once interviewed Baird, she told me she called her drawings for short essays, hoping people could get something out of seeing her work. ‘My everyday life is like everyone else's, it's about recognition.’ This book with her mother certainly seems to depict a struggle, to paraphrase Knausgaard. In one drawing, Baird is sweeping a never-ending dirty floor, with several kids around her, while in a corner her frail mother is lying in a bed. On the top she has written: ‘Stuck in genes and affection.’

Another mother and daughter relationship is evoked in the photograph Kiddo by Linn Pedersen, included in her recently opened exhibition Omland at Golsa in Oslo. The image is the imprint left in the snow after her youngest daughter outside their house in Lofoten. It was dark outside, Pedersen tells me, and she was carrying groceries from the car as she walked past this impression her daughter had made in the snow. It reminded Pedersen of a cherub from a Raphael painting mixed with the Michelin man, an astronaut, and craters in the lunar surface. Many of the images in the exhibition are from the north of Norway, where she has moved back with her family after many years in the South. Omland in Norwegian means land surrounding an area, and the exhibition is a kind of rediscovery of her old surroundings, very clearly suggested in two images next to each other, one depicting a mountain and the other a mountain of souvenirs, old business cards, passport photos, notes.

A chance meeting, a daughter taking care of her mother and children, and an imprint of a young child in the snow. All three artists were working with a fulcrum in their own life and family situations, and during these weeks of a new lockdown in Oslo it became for me a triptych almost emblematic of the situation. We just have to make the best of it. And it helps to make or see art. 

Linn Pedersen, Kiddo, 2021.