HELGE SKODVIN, KNUT EGIL WANG & UNCERTAIN STATES
The Summer Show
June, 2024
Helge Skodvin, Observations of New Norwegian Fauna in the Years 2014–2022
In the outdoor atrium: Helge Skodvin + Knut Egil Wang + Uncertain States Scandinavia (UCSS).
In the Project Space: UCSS presents "Projekt Pappa" by Camilla Jämting & "Reach" by Lilliana Rose Lyons.
In the @ucsscandinavia paper: Erik Havene, Lill Ann Chepstow-Luster, Helge Garke, Karolina Wojtas, Nina Bergkvam, Mona Ødegård, Klaus Pichler, Helge Skodvin og Knut Egil Wang.
The reluctance and wildness of small-town life are portrayed through thuja hedges, gossip mirrors, and a new Norwegian garden fauna when the country’s most serious humorists within the Norwegian comtemporary photography scene exhibit together for the first time.
Over the course of eight years, Bergen-based photographer Helge Skodvin traveled across Norway photographing the country’s new fauna made of plastic, fiberglass, concrete, and metal - an expedition that resulted in what he himself describes as a low-threshold zoological offering. None of the animals in Skodvin’s Observations of New Norwegian Fauna in the Years 2014–2022 are real, but all the photographs are. The motifs are found, observed, and documented in their natural habitat, among village animals, garden patches, traffic medians, terraced houses, driveways, and decks.
The two-legged creatures inhabiting the nation’s towns and villages have ceded the stage to the artificial animals they have chosen to decorate their surroundings with—animals that, in their most brazen expressions, break with the otherwise razor-sharp fortress walls of thuja hedges and uniform façades that dominate the series’ 69 images. The exhibition presents a selection of these works, accompanied by texts by Skodvin himself and a specially commissioned essay by Bjørn Hatterud.
Around the same time, Skodvin’s colleague Knut Egil Wang traveled to the town of Nykøbing Mors in Denmark, where the images in the series Searching for Jante were photographed. The Law of Jante was first described in the novel 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 expresses people’s ability to keep both one another and themselves down. The physical model for Sandemose’s Jante is precisely the town of Nykøbing Mors.
Wang wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery of the Law of Jante and find out whether it can be captured on film—and, not least, whether it still has the power to say something about who we Scandinavians are.
Like Skodvin, Wang has not staged any of the images in his series, and an omnipresent absurdity permeates both bodies of work. Both series were published in 2023 as two separate photobooks by the same publisher (Journal). At the exhibition opening, both artists will be present, and there will be artist talks about each project.
For the second year in a row, the artist collective Uncertain States Scandinavia (USSC) has also been invited to produce a special edition of their newspaper—this time featuring nine contemporary photographers engaging in dialogue with the works of Skodvin and Wang. In addition, USSC will take over the project room with two video installations, while the newspaper will be distributed free of charge to all visitors at Sukkerbiten from a specially built newsstand.
Newsstand, Uncertain States Scandinavia
The Summer Show, Knut Egil Wang, FRAKT, 2024