New Purchases for the collection

«Slash & Burn» is the result of four years of photography and exploration of forest Finnish areas with special emphasis on the Finn forest. Terje Abusdal (b. 1978) is a trained visual artist and photographer and works in the intersection between fact and fiction.

 Abusdal is based on the forest Finnish understanding of nature and especially the shamanistic and mysterious aspects of it. The forest Finns farmed, where they cut down and burned forests and sowed in the ashes, this is called in English slash and burn, hence the title. The photographs also depict what it means to be a forest fin today, four hundred years and thus twelve generations after the Finnish immigrants settled. In our time, the original way of life has long since disappeared and no one speaks the Finnish language anymore. But the forest Finns are one of five historical immigration groups that from 1999 have the status of national minority in Norway. They settled in 40 municipalities in Eastern Norway and today more than half a million Norwegians can have forest Finnish genes in their lineage - most without knowing it. The Finnish forest culture as it was in the 17th century naturally no longer exists. Nevertheless, more and more people feel a sense of belonging to the culture.

Eyes as Big as Plates is the ongoing collaborative project between the Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth. Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature.

The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Since 2011 the artist duo has portrayed seniors in Norway, Finland, France, US, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden, South Korea, Czech Republic, Japan, Senegal, Outer Hebrides, Tasmania and Greenland.

Each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists.

As active participants in our contemporary society, these seniors encourage the rediscovery of a demographic group too often labelled as marginalized or even as a stereotypical cliché. It is in this light that the project aims to generate new perspectives on who we are and where we belong.

eyesasbigasplates.com

In the photo series "Somnulence", Gjert Rognli wants to present an alluringly colorful depiction of a mythological and surrealistic landscape. In the photographs, he uses displaced post-war houses that he fills with water, living and dead animals, his body, and nature as a backdrop for the stories he tells about the eternal cycles of life. The works are open to more questions and interpretations; has man lost his closeness to the more supernatural or religious nature? A presentation that brings us as viewers closer to life and death? This series has won a number of international photo awards, the project has been done over time, in Oslo and Kåfjord in North Troms.

The series consists of 11 Polaroid photographs of inherited photographic equipment, technical specifications and usage history 

Polaroid photographs, digital printing and ink on paper.

In the Technical Department, the camera equipment is documented as Polaroid photographs, and its technical specifications are linked to the equipment's actual history of use.

Signe Marie Andersen – Isolation

In the series Isolation, Signe Marie Andersen has photographed the screened ward for dementia at a nursing home in Oslo. 80 percent of the nursing home residents in Norway have dementia. Most of these live in closed wards where the stay lasts a lifetime. Closing doors means deprivation of liberty and is a form of isolation. But it is also meant to shield patients from a confusing world in which they cannot orient themselves. As Andersen puts it; When the outside world has become too big, and the inner world has become too small, then there is a third world, the sheltered department. It is not chosen by themselves, and it can be both safe and frightening. In this world, people move with their fragmented memories, they seek confirmation and perhaps their family. They are disappointed and happy. They are behind closed doors, sheltered from the big world and in their own time. This is the world Signe Marie Andersen is trying to resolve in her photo series.

The book and project Fold Out, which is Winkelmann's 5th monograph, deals with the naked human body of different ages, genders, and ethnicities. The body forms the basis of our experience of ourselves and the world. Winkelmann has entered into a close dialogue with various bodies and examines the extent to which the body can be represented without shame and without the viewer becoming a voyeur. She has wanted to explore the possibilities in the body as a material and the ornamental potential in its forms. Through fragmentation and close studies, the book is a quest to find out what the undisguised and unadorned body looks like.

The body has always been a political battleground. Through various forms of power and ideologies, our bodies are tamed and shaped. Through photographic representation and self-realization ideals, stereotypes are confirmed and produced. Most of the bodies we see in public are sexualized and perfected, the naked body without a filter has become both foreign and dangerous. Winkelmann makes us feel this shyness, and in that way she puts the spotlight on something as unusual as a body without direction or sales potential.

(Text taken from the publisher's review of the book)

The picture Solaris # II shows a western lowland gorilla baby bought for the collection at the Natural History Museum in Oslo in 1966. The work thematizes a changed view of the concept of nature that is linked to the climate crisis and the Anthropocene age we are in.