Cosmic, Bodily, Seeded

  • A multimedia artist from Bergen. After graduating from Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she lived and worked for many years in London and Berlin. She is now based once again in her hometown of Bergen. Trine Lise is best known for her intriguing and uncanny video works. Through intimate, playful performances and makeshift materials, her work explores our shared experience of a temporal existence in a relentless eternity.

  • An artist and musician from Trondheim. Tobias holds an MFA in Fine Art from the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen. His work focuses on the emotional consequences—such as shame and irritability—of social structures and cultural traditions on the individual. Through sculpture, installation, and sound art, he materialises his reflections on architecture, history, and the objective world into works with a therapeutic dimension.

    His series Antiseeds begins with the typological resemblance between manmade weapons—such as bombs and bullets—and plant seeds, and seeks to explore the boundary between benefit and harm. Is our will separate from the forms we create, or are we complicit in their destructive potential? Tobias invites viewers to engage with his work through touch and interaction, to collectively investigate the relationship between humans and objects.

  • Originally from Germany, now based in Bergen. Daniela creates biomorphic sculptural installations using two materially and tactilely contrasting elements: ceramics and textiles. By wrapping seemingly fragile ceramic shards in hand-dyed nylon textiles, she searches for the overlapping space between beauty and repulsion. Her work aims to provoke a kind of synaesthetic response between sight and touch, triggering a deeper emotional engagement in the viewer.

    A graduate of the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen, Daniela’s work has been widely exhibited across Europe in major art and craft exhibitions representing Norway, and has received numerous international awards.

I was suddenly alive. It happened in the summer.
Now I have some wild crocuses (white and purple) in my garden. I wasn’t the one who planted them; the seeds were blown in from the neighbour’s garden.
I germinated in the womb of my mother, but I didn’t spread to the rest of her body; when I was born, we split in two. Sometimes it’s her great sorrow, other times it’s mine.
– Fredrik Hagen

At the door, I met Shuo on his way out. He told me Yilei was having a meeting with a young girl. I came in and met the back of 52-year-old Trine Lise, still straighter than many of the young girls. She was here to discuss her new publication, which will be published through our Kinakaal Forlag. (Working title: Player)

Trine Lise has been travelling the world and has sojourned in art capitals such as New York, London, and Berlin—not without leaving footprints. In recent years, she returned to her hometown, Bergen, with her husband and children, and continued working in peace among mountains and seas. Last year, her solo exhibition was featured not only in the cultural section of the local newspaper Bergens Tidende, but also made it onto the social news section—some individual with a discerning eye had stolen a pair of glass eyeballs from the exhibition. The Bergen police, whose case-solving rate had practically hit rock bottom in the past, somehow managed to return the eyeballs to their rightful owner in just ten days. Rumour had it the eyeballs, before being recovered, were nestled in a vase at the offender’s house—without a scratch. Trine Lise then commented: Now they have seen it all.

Right before Christmas, we visited Trine Lise’s new home for the first time. On the wall in front of the dining table was a photo by Shanghai photographer Maleonn from 20 years ago. In another version of the story—or in another parallel universe (what’s the most trendy way to put it now?)—it should have been a child-faced Yilei in the picture, as the happy ending of this long text. But in our world, it was another photo from the same series Yilei also modelled in—this time with another girl stuck in the same glass greenhouse brimming with blossoms.

Skin: The outermost layer of skin always falls off, as if we are constantly getting closer to the true innermost part of the body.
– Fredrik Hagen

Though it has long moved away from the city centre, Gyldenpris Art Centre was still well-visited, even in such blizzarding weather. Daniela was clearly the shining star in the first group show this year, titled Glitch in the Forest. Five years ago, in the pop-up exhibition curated by Canadian curator Michael Laundry at our Space—which lasted only three evenings—those gash-like, unsettlingly beautiful works were still lying timidly in vitrines borrowed from KODE Museum. Now, the sculptures with that same eerie quality were poised in the heart of the exhibition hall with graceful gravitas, receiving the admiration of visitors from the entrance.

With the crisp collision of ceramic shards, one piece in the shape of a cobra—scaled and horned—suddenly came alive over the shoulder of Japanese dance artist Yohei Hamada. As the opening performance, Yohei explored every possible way to relate his body to the piece under the audience’s scrutiny. The sound of the ceramic shards became the background music: brittle, yet unshatterable. Gradually, the sculpture became a part of him—a fifth limb—as if separating them would be a drastically painful operation.

Daniela, in the studio, on the other hand, was shy and peaceful, with little of the uncanny quality that the works bring about. However, she was honest about her curiosity and fascination with the inner structure of the body since childhood. She has ever since been striving to reinvent a balance between what is repulsive and what is beautiful, by incorporating soft textiles and jagged ceramic shards, to blend the sensations of seeing and touching, and to cure—once and for all—everyone’s trypophobia.

…from the stars we resemble a star,
in other skies our sun is a part of constellations that have got names after animals we cannot imagine.
– Fredrik Hagen

Therefore, the idea of curating an exhibition with three Norwegian artists under the Open M Art Fair came to us quite out of the blue. The seed of the thought, following the spring drizzle of Bergen, entered our minds and rooted, germinated.

Tobias was packing for his residency project in China when we pushed open the door to his studio. The slight fidget in the air reminded me of the days before the first time I came to Bergen – much anticipated, but it still felt abrupt when the time arrived, constantly on edge. I don’t know whether our presence would aggravate or relieve this big boy from Northern Norway of his anxiety.

It wasn’t long since we first met Tobias by chance at Lydgalleriet (Exhibition Platform for Sound Art in Bergen) – he was helping another artist set up her exhibition. After that, we ran into him on many different occasions – sometimes himself, with his impressively tall build; sometimes his sensitivity, represented by his delicate work.

He must be very organised: the sculptures for us to choose from were already knolled on the table when we entered the room – seeds like weapons, or weapons like seeds. Every piece gave a unique sense of solace in the palm. The hand didn’t need to receive orders from the eyes or the brain to find the most comfortable and apt angle – like caressing a long-lost friend, or a toy reunited with a part missing since childhood.

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