JANUARY 2021
NORTH GALLERY
Nordic Light and Darkness | Kim Jansson and Josefine Östberg Olsson
Working across video and fabrics Nordic Light and Darkness, the two Swedish based artists first show together, revolve around this sort of situation-based logic, where both the landscape and cars works as amplifiers of the situation. In this exhibition through act of cleaning an internal combustion engine and a hunt for the first Sun after the polar night.
Statement from the artists:
We wanted to go to Alaska to experience and inhale the logic woven into the car launch event in Glacier View on 4th of July. Twice these last two years, we’ve booked plane tickets, both times it was cancelled. First time due to a financial crisis on a personal level, and the second was due to Covid19. The starting point of our now two-year long collaboration was this event in Glacier View, with the monumental Alaskan landscape as backdrop, and the name Glacier View, setting the mood, concept and title. Then... cars flying through the sky... Like the final scene in Thelma and Louise (1991), on repeat.
Josefine Östberg Olsson holds an MA degree in Fine Art, Valand Academy (2016). Östberg Olsson works mainly through performance and has exhibited at several galleries in Sweden and is represented in collections both in Sweden and internationally.
In Fluid and Dirt, a series of digitally printed fabrics, the motifs have emerged through the physical act of thoroughly cleaning a V8 engine, a performance by Östberg Olsson that lasted for 4 days, through layers of dirt, engine oil, gearbox oil, and other car-related liquids. The cloths have later been printed digitally on textiles, creating the distance needed from smell and stickiness to turn the motifs into images, resulting in abstract landscapes of darkness and light on cotton cloth, images of a heart-breaking goodbye, when she decided never to drive a combustion engine again.
Östberg Olsson writes: “Feeling a roaring V8 setting off at full speed gives me goosebumps, and through my performance practice I have, until now, driven a V8 engine many times. For me it’s about desire, a desire for risk-taking at full speed, all summed up in the car...”
Kim Jansson is a video based artist and holds a BFA degree in Fine Art, Valand Academy (2016). Her short documentary The Family Farm has been shown at several international film festivals including Anchorage International Film Festival in 2019.
Driven by a deep interest in traveling to remote places in the north, Kim Jansson has travelled by sea to the fishing village Berlevåg in the Arctic part of Norway. In Jansson’s video From Darkness, the viewer meets the sun after its return from the long-lasting polar nigh. A short glimpse of the sun is visible, as it emerges from behind the clouds.
Jansson writes; “Last winter I went on a five-day boat journey to Berlevåg. I wanted a slow way of travel, allowing me to adapt to the changes of the landscape along the Norwegian coast. I had a strong wish to be in Berlevåg when the sun came back after the polar night, as its breaking out of the dark. A manifestation of the polarities between light and darkness. This is as far as one can get on the Scandinavian mainland, it really feels like being at the end of the world.”