Honerud concentrated on two works during her time at NJP: Reality Slipped Into a Symbol, and Regarding the Pain of the Future
Reality Slipped Into a Symbol is the final part of a larger work from the Moria Refugee Camp on the island of Lesbos in Greece. In this work, all the photos are manipulated. By manipulating the images, I want to encourage the viewer to pose questions about the truth value of the photos. In a world full of manipulated photos, it is surprising that we still view photographs as true in many contexts. Even though we know that they can easily be manipulated and that the story changes depending on where the camera is pointed, we nevertheless still trust a photograph. I believe this is because we read photographs almost intuitively, and that we do not make any great distinction between what we see and what we feel when we read a picture in front of us.
I continue the visual expression using layers, visible manipulation and almost a violation of the image, in the second work:
Regarding the Pain of the Future
Here, I follow rescue workers, seed growers, avid gardeners, refugees, soldiers, nature lovers, young people and others around Norway, Australia and Europe. How do we prepare for crises, and how should we be prepared for the future?
Following an era of modernity and individualism, the idea of the future is no longer exclusively filled with opportunities. The opportunity to fulfil our dreams is once again dependent on a destructive situation around us. The struggle to save the planet does not look promising, either with a view to climate trends or to the probability that radical changes will be effected in behaviour or policies;
Populist politics and non-democratic movements are constantly gaining momentum.
Humankind has always lived with the threat of crises, but from the perspective of a cosmopolitan, western cultural sphere, a change has occurred. At the core of modern pop culture is the notion that tomorrow will always be better than today; this element is inherent. Self-fulfilment and who you aspire to be, have, in many ways, been separate from the pressures, the forces and the coincidences of the world around us.
In a nutshell, the connections between self/world and the future/time will be recalibrated.
About Hilde:
Hilde Honerud (b. 1977) was educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the Academy of Fine Art, and Napier University in Edinburgh. She is an associate professor of Photography at the University of South-Eastern Norway. In the past few years, Honerud has been responsible for a number of exhibitions, seminars, publications and scholarly articles. In 2018, she was Buskerud County’s artist in residence. She has had separate exhibitions at the Rake showroom in Trondheim, Nord-Trøndelag County Art Museum, the Photo Gallery in Oslo, Buskerud County Art Centre in Drammen, Bærum Art Hall, NITJA Centre for Contemporary Art in Lillestrøm, MELK and QB in Oslo. Her works have been acquired by private and public collections, and she has been awarded a number of prizes. Honerud lives in Kongsberg and has a studio in Vestfossen.
Hilde Honerud’s works approximate a journalistic, documentary style, but the motifs are far from classical catastrophic photography. Honerud weaves the reflective, political and ordinary together into a story, and investigates the complex relationship between form and content. By taking a formal approach, Honerud aspires to examine how precarious political and social conditions can be experienced through that which is routine and readily recognisable. Through her photos, she tries to meld our lives together through everyday routines and intimacy. In so doing, she showcases both the small life and the big one.
Website: http://www.hildehonerud.com
