AUDIO
ROOTED AND BRANCHED
Audio 8/8
8.
Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen
0:00
AUDIO
Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen
In the last room, the exhibition invites you to reflect on your own roots. Here you can see the photo series Eyes as Big as Plates by the Scandinavian artists Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen. Since 2011 they have been creating photographic portraits of people, each embedded in nature in different ways. The resulting images are touching, and also often humorous.
One shows Agnes from Norway. Agnes has a wrinkled face and smiles at the camera with an inquisitive curiosity in her eyes. She wears a headdress made of woven branches. It looks as if the wind were seizing the branches and artfully blowing them around. The portrait is dedicated to the North Wind, which plays an important role in many Nordic fairy tales and sagas.
In all of the photographs, the people wear costumes made from natural materials, such as tree branches, mushrooms, or ice. They stand in water or lie buried up to their chins in a pile of manure. Hjorth and Ikonen develop these wearable sculptures in close collaboration with the people they portray, who also choose the location for their portraits. This is always a familiar environment, a landscape they feel connected to. With their series, the two artists want to explore the question of what significance nature has for us as modern people. They also focus on identifying the places we have a special connection to, and focus on exploring how we can represent this relationship. They create pictures of people who playfully and lovingly connect with nature and represent themselves as part of it. At the same time, highlighting this connection with nature also reminds us how fragile that connection is, and how easily we could lose it.
One shows Agnes from Norway. Agnes has a wrinkled face and smiles at the camera with an inquisitive curiosity in her eyes. She wears a headdress made of woven branches. It looks as if the wind were seizing the branches and artfully blowing them around. The portrait is dedicated to the North Wind, which plays an important role in many Nordic fairy tales and sagas.
In all of the photographs, the people wear costumes made from natural materials, such as tree branches, mushrooms, or ice. They stand in water or lie buried up to their chins in a pile of manure. Hjorth and Ikonen develop these wearable sculptures in close collaboration with the people they portray, who also choose the location for their portraits. This is always a familiar environment, a landscape they feel connected to. With their series, the two artists want to explore the question of what significance nature has for us as modern people. They also focus on identifying the places we have a special connection to, and focus on exploring how we can represent this relationship. They create pictures of people who playfully and lovingly connect with nature and represent themselves as part of it. At the same time, highlighting this connection with nature also reminds us how fragile that connection is, and how easily we could lose it.