Artist: Leander Djønne
Exhibition title: Øyde til øyde
Venue: SCHLOSS, Oslo, Norway
Date: January 27, 2017
Photography: Vegard Kleven, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and SCHLOSS
Leander Djønne’s Øyde til øyde is a documentary video of sorts, presenting footage from a selection of historic sites in Scandinavia, and places where industry has taken its toll.
It is filmed on location in Tysso, Elvadalen, Husavik on the Faeroe Islands, Kiruna, and Reyðarfjörður. Music accompaniments by archaeologist Grjótgard Hálfdanarson Ellingsen on the lyre and a bronze age tagel-harp cuts into the images. Fruit farmer Gjertrud Bleie reads Djønne’s poems.
The work is an informative historic/geologic video-guide, but also slow-TV (NRKs Hurtigruta, Bergensbanen) and a vehicle for poetry and music. It is a restless meditation on the sculptural qualities of man’s reshaping of his environment. The camera has a fierce presence. Djønne’s video eye drives the viewer through aluminum mines, iron ore mines, past petroglyphs, over ruins and a stone quarry from the Viking age.
Time, permanence, impermanence, and the cultural depth of the chosen sites are of the essence. The video describes man’s slow, unyielding carving into nature, and nature’s steady, irrepressible carving into man.
Djønne grew up in a Jehovah’s Witnesses family, next to the Odda smelter and close to the Tysso power plant. Much of his work maps a murky territory between pagan remnants and industrial intervention.
– Matias Faldbakken
Leander Djønne (b.1981 in Odda, Norway, lives and works in Oslo and Hardanger, Norway)
