Hyperstate was a joint exhibition by the young Norwegian artists Lars Brekke and Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel, who spent two weeks in residence in Murmansk preparing the show. It formed part of the Guestbook project, which researched the relationship between the contemporary artist and the audience.
Both works turn on how a human mind handles what happens in nature — one asking whether horror is a property of the event or of the viewer, the other whether we can perceive a process slower than ourselves. The gap between the two ways of perceiving is the hyperstate the title names: a viewpoint lifted clear of moral assessment.
Read against the Guestbook question, it translates directly: if a work of art seems alien and even frightening, that is a private emotion. Seen from another angle it can be beautiful — as the wildfire in Brekke's performance is, admiring itself.
Works
Lars Brekke (NO)
Wildfire, 2016
performance · new production for the exhibition
Perception of wildfire is dualistic. A fire can cause destruction and suffering; it can be deliberately started and put out, with or without purpose. The common human reactions — horror, guilt, responsibility, anger — attach to it automatically. But some wildfires happen with no human involvement at all: they are older than human reason, and forests have adapted to them, so a wildfire also plays a positive part in the renewal of nature. Brekke's performance is dedicated to that split. Natural phenomena that touch human lives are judged only negatively, while those out of reach of morality can be studied safely and even admired — so, with a shift of perspective, a wildfire can give no less aesthetic satisfaction than the aurora borealis.
Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (NO)
Book of Trees, series
installation · glass, liquid, thread, fluorite, mirror
The series is united by a spectrum of greens, in materials whose colour is impermanent and shifts with the angle of the light — pointing at once to nature's multitudes and to the mind's ongoing thought process. Human perception struggles to grasp nature's slow changes: like the deterioration of a mountain, the very long decolorization of a fluorite crystal is hard to imagine (Book of Trees no. 4 (Memory Archive)). The turbid liquid transfusing in its tank is the constant fleeting thought that cannot be stopped; the glass box of iridescent green threads is the whirlpool of memory, from which nothing can be drawn separately, since one memory inevitably clings to another — the mirrored bottom only confirming the infinite process.
