Kaare Ruud at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen

We build walls so we can build houses so we can build homes where we build walls.

In Weather forever, Kaare Ruud invites us into a landscape consisting of splintered memory and fractured language. The exhibition echoes the moment language breaks down — where grief leaves us mute and memory mutates. Yet Ruud insists that this breakdown is not the end. Through a series of sculptural installations and architectural interventions, the show reflects on what remains when language falters, and what might rise in its place.

During Ruud’s childhood, his father would bring him along to experience and photograph landscapes altered by extreme weather. Floodwaters and the damage left in their wake became a shared spectacle, imbuing a sense of fear as well as closeness, drawing their attention away from the rhythms of daily life and toward something awe-inspiring. Ruud didn’t know it at the time, but as a child his father had experienced having his home washed away in a flood. The artist’s investigation of memory, disruption and transformation manifests in the exhibition through both the removal of some of the structural layers of the gallery as well as the inclusion of new, unstable structural elements.

The exhibition partially builds from personal fragments, such as photographs of flooded landscapes, hazy conversations and domestic objects that appear almost as peculiar sketches come to life. A sofa that once occupied the family home seems to have developed plant-like qualities, sprouting and searching for nourishment. A long wall creates a passage into the exhibition space where domestic properties blend together; living room, kitchen and a closet. By recontextualising wax covers commonly used for dining tables, they adopt an almost skin-like texture, and together with the holes of the structure, become a makeshift metaphor for a human body. The exhibition operates between rhythmic cohesion and arrhythmic disruption. Many of the elements signify time, referencing to historical moments – yet their temporal coordinates remain obscured, without a date it’s tough to understand if this is the future or the past.

The exhibition takes literary inspiration from Tor Ulven’s novel Avløsning, in which Ulven through one of the narrative threads attempts to reconstruct a burned-down barn, from pieces of inherited memory. For Ruud, this ruin becomes a metaphor for the unreliability of both memory and language, and at the same time, the possibility of building anew from their remains. Attuned to different states of loss, change and regrowth, Weather forever becomes not the reconstruction of a singular narrative, but rather a constellation – a letter that is not written, but felt.

Kaare Ruud (b. 1993, Gausdal) lives and works in Oslo. He graduated with an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2020. Ruud’s artistic practice primarily focuses on sculptural interventions and works in a range of diverse and unconventional materials.