Julia de Cooker | Svalbard - An Arcticficial Life | KEHRER VERLAG

Julia de Cooker - Svalbard – An Arcticficial Life from Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg on Vimeo.

Julia de Cooker | Svalbard - an Arcticficial life | KEHRER VERLAG

There is a place where no one is authorized to be born or to die.

Julia de Cooker, Svalbard - An Arctictficial Life

The first impression you have when you arrive on the Svalbard islands is to land on the moon. 

The photographs of Julia de Cooker tell just about this strange combination of estrangement and 

loneliness.

As she writes in the text enclosed at the end of the book Svalbard - an Arcticficial life:
 - At this latitude, the Svalbard society, with a quarter of its population changing every year, is almost 

science fiction. Strangeness appears through different sorts of details. The combination of 

elements that have nothing to do with each other, or with the natural environment, is gripping. -

The book, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2017, is a collection of photos which report a state of 

mind more than the history of a place or of the people who live there.

The pale blue light on the snow, the sea of ​​ice, the waves of wind, the cold, the endless Arctic 

night are just some of the atmospheres that Julia de Cooker captures with intensity and clarity. 

This incredible clarity combined with the strange circumstances and Svalbard's habits make 

these images almost 'surreal'.

The artist created this project from 2013 to 2016 and exhibited part of it in an exhibition, in 

March 2017, at the Galleri Svalbard in Longyearbyen.

The collection presents many images that belong to different groups. First of all there are the 

landscapes covered with snow with the  northern lights that glimpse over the mountains, which 

seem to come out of a fairytale.

In some cases, different photographs are collected together in group of two or three and placed 

side by side to form a single landscape. However, these groups do not reproduce a particular 

real place, but are combinations of different views that in some way resemble each other and 

which the artist has artificially re-created.

There are views of Longyearbyen, the Norwegian town and of Barentsburg, the Russian town.

There are also portraits: a blonde girl, covered with a heavy seal fur, is sitting on a snowmobile, 

turned three-quarters. She is taking up her rifle: the weapon is obligatory for everyone who 

want to go outside the city, in defense from polar bears attack.

Another beautiful portrait is that of a girl who works at the Karlsberger Pub; she poses giving 

her back to a wall where are collected bottles of whiskey of all kinds.

There is a group of photos that prove in a detail how much the human presence in these places 

can be absurd. In a photo there is a canoe drifting in a sea of ​​snow. In another there is a white 

limousine lost in the mountains. The formal beauty of the images contrasts ironically with the 

content of them. The idea was to unmask the islands and to see it for what it is far from any 

sort of exoticism. But through Julia de Cooker’s photos, it is difficult to resist at the 

extraordinary beauty and mysterious charm of these places and then let yourself go to a strange 

mixed feeling of irony and nostalgia.

Anette Gellein - Studio Visit -

Anette Gellein

https://anette.gellein.com

Dirty Magazines from Anette Gellein on Vimeo.

It all starts with the sound for Anette Gellein and how it goes through the body. Wherever it 

comes from: the human voice, a recording, a simple noise or electronically made, it has its own 

power, its physicality while the human body becomes transparent, a porous surface.

Anett Gellein (1995) lives and works between Lofoten and Oslo, Norway. She graduated this 

year at the Tromsø Art Academy. Anette spent a couple of months in Longyearbyen doing an 

internship at Artica Svalbard, helping the director Audhild  Dahlstrøm to coordinate the events.

Anette's idea at the beginning of her practice is to mix the ethereal aspect of sound with the 

impenetrability of the body to create a heterogeneity that can not be synthesized.

In the triple installation Situation of (All Writing is Pigshit) the Flesh, Maenad Maenad Adman, 

 We, The Born Capitalists, ( 2017 ), the three films are projected on transparent screens in order 

to build a sort of maze that aloud  to  watch the films both individually and through each other, 

in perspective.

Deeply influenced by Antonin Artaud, she herself explains in a text about the three videos on 

her website: - I wanted to create another space, a kind of non-space. A place where there are 

other rules, where there are other possibilities of becoming and being in other ways. Having 

multiple identities. Working with the images as a medium, subtracting colors and inverting the 

images created a possibility for me to build this visual space where the body can look like flesh 

and transform to lines. Where it can be in flux, and multi-faceted-.

The performance S.M.A.B. ( 2016 ) emerges from the desire to give the written word the same 

consistency of sound. The result is a performance that is also a video in which homogeneity 

and the incongruity of the auditory experience is expressed through the presence and voice of 

actors.

The transition from the acoustic dimension to the more spatial one s like that between an image 

and its negative. Ahtnamas ( 2017 ), is the story of a sex robot and of another commodification 

of human desire.

More than the story of a machine that promises to extinguish the desire, the artist insists on the 

possibility of express the inextinguishable desire that goes through all things and all people.

I find very interesting the way in which Anette elaborates the images, transforming them in 

their negatives, taken from reality, as in XXXXRadio ( 2017 ) where the synthetic sound of 

electronic music guides the swaying and multiplying of a leaf.

In DIRTY MAGAZINES ( 2017 ) the images come from newscasts, gossip tv programs and 

internet magazines. They are already originally conceived as a form of manipulation aimed at 

consumption. Anette perverts the use of it, reversing them to the negative, abstracting the 

figures, synthesizing the voices.

The next performance of Anette Gellein will be on December 16. in Oslo at the:

WINTER SOLSTICE 2017

here is the Facebook link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/336732140104848/

S.M.A.B utdrag fra performance from Anette gellein on Vimeo.