The two photographers Helge Skodvin and Knut Egil Wang have taken different approaches to addressing resistance to small town living and to rural wildness. The two NJP alumni will now be showing their works together for the first time.
The photographers will open their joint exhibition at 6 p.m. on Thursday, 6 June. The venue will be Sukkerbiten (the Sugar Cube) in Oslo, the House of Photography’s gallery for photo-based art. The opening will also feature a dialogue about their art between Skodvin and Wang, in addition to a garden party.
For eight years, Helge Skodvin travelled all over Norway taking photos of the country’s new fauna in plastic, fibre glass, concrete, and metals – an expedition that resulted in what himself describes as “an offer with a low zoological threshold”.
While none of the animals in Skodvin’s book ‘Observations of new Norwegian fauna from 2014 to 2022’ are real, all the images are real. The motifs were identified, observed and registered in their natural element, including ‘village animals’ (a literary concept created to describe people subjected to narrow-minded small-town pressure to conform), garden plots, central grass strips between roads, row houses, driveways and decks.
The two-legged creatures who inhabit the country’s cities and villages have left the stage to the fictitious animals they have chosen to surround themselves with as decorations. At their most ostentatious, they break up the pointed fortifications presented by thuja hedges and the uniformed facades that serves as a backdrop for the 69 pictures in the series.
The exhibition includes a selection of them, along with texts by Skodvin himself and a specially composed essay by Bjørn Hatterud.
At roughly the same time, Skodvin’s colleague Knut Egil Wang travelled to the of city Nykøbing Mors in Denmark, where he took the photographs in the series ‘Searching for Jante’.
The Law of Jante was first described in the novel entitled ‘A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks’ (1933) by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose. In the novel, Jante is a small town where the Law of Jante is an expression of people’s ability to hold back each other and themselves. The physical model for Sandemose’s Jante is precisely the town of Nykøbing Mors.
Wang wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery about the Law of Jante, to find out if it could be captured on film and, not least, whether it still says something about who we are as Scandinavians.
Like Skodvin, Wang himself had not orchestrated any of the photos in the series, and a certain ubiquitous absurdity permeates both universes. In 2023, the series were published in two different photo books by the same publishing house (Journal).
Both artists will attend the opening of the exhibition, and there will be discussions about each of the projects.
For the second consecutive year, the artists’ collective Uncertain States of Scandinavia (USSC) has been invited to make a special issue of their newspaper. This issue will include a report on nine contemporary photographers as they engage in a dialogue about the works of Skodvin and Wang. In addition, USSC will set up two video installations in the project room, while the newspaper will be distributed free of charge for all visitors to Sukkerbiten in Oslo from a specially constructed newspaper kiosk.
