Cold Border
Installation, wood, projection, 2,5x2,7 m, 2020. Galleri Snerk, Tromsø.
Something happens with one’s gaze on Svalbard, especially during the polar night’s constant darkness. It takes a lot of effort for the eyes to discern contours. A house turns out to be a fence at a closer look, the horizon is difficult to discern as there are no trees that can separate it from the sky, the world transforms into a single bottomless tone. It could almost be described as motion sickness; a world with otherwise straight references is suddenly replaced by a world with skewed ones.
With the installation, I wanted to capture the feeling of distorted perspectives that I experienced during my stay in Svalbard. When you as a visitor stood in front of the installation, the two cut-out parts looked to be the same size. If you took a few steps to the side, however, you noticed that the front part was much larger, and that the rear piece of wood was also placed at an oblique angle. The viewer thus needed to occupy a specific vantage point to reconstruct the image. The projection itself consisted of a photograph of a mountain I captured on Svalbard.
