Norwegian photographer Mette Tronvoll opens her exhibition Time at the Kunstsilo in Kristiansand, from January 30th to May 25th, 2025. While presenting famous portraits of the 1990s, taken from Double Portrait and AGE Women’s series, Mette Tronvoll also unveils her long exploration of the Norwegian southern coast, playing with the silent and yet constantly evolving beauty of islands and inlands.
The exhibition begins with a series of portraits taken from the 1990s and continue with recent works, mostly taken on the Norwegian island of Hidra. Most of your photographs were taken standstill, as if there was a continuity of patterns or style whether it be portrait or landscape photographs, over a period of thirty years. In that sense, there is a respectful distance to your subject, even though you get into the very essence of it, to its inner poetry.
I went recently to the Museum of Modern Art and rediscovered works by Eugene Atget, where he shows the former buildings of Paris, and I’m being so amazed by his patience and the ability to stay in the moment. My work is about the atmosphere, and maybe it has this Scandinavian feel – somehow composed of distance and attention to nature to it in that sense.
You mentioned August Sander and his life project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) as a key reference in your work. Yet your work is not only about portraits, and you seemed to have shifted from human to life and nature. Why August Sander is so important in your works?
I’ve seen Sander here and there during my life. In 2003, I even went to the August Sander Stiftung in Köln for a talk with Thomas Struth, and I now realized how in debt I am to the work of Sander. He’s a shoulder I can stand on. I’m interpreting his work, or his method, in my own way. Norway doesn’t have a tradition of photography in any way in the terms of France, Germany, America has. But I think I have managed to combine these abroad references with my Scandinavian sensibility and feels what comes out in this atmosphere. Just like Sander, I really want to make documents that can be a source for history. It’s about documenting the country I live in, documenting its history and evolution.
In your exhibition at the Kunstsilo, you’re presenting a series on sea that was taken on or in between sea. You photograph the Arctic Sea mostly in Hidra off the coast of Flekkefjord in Southern Norway, but also its surroundings. I felt there was also the idea of composing with the horizon; an idea which is also very present in how you curated the exhibition, playing with horizontal lines. The horizon, of course, is very present on the island, and you photographed Hidra in 2018, 2020 and more constantly, 2023. What was the genesis of this series?
The origins of this series go back to the early 90s, when I proposed the state of Norway to document its society and its evolution. While I came back to live in Norway in 2007, after having known Berlin, Paris or New York, the idea of telling the culture of the Norwegian aroused back. And I wanted to document the Norwegian coast life, with whom I was not very familiar with. The series isn’t about nostalgia but about telling the richness of inland forests, the beauty of natural caves and, of course, the importance of sea in Hidra. I was helped by a dozen people who connected me to the islanders of Hidra, who showed me boathouses, how fishermen worked, who welcomed on their boats, and I believe I now will be marked for all my life by the beauty of this island.
There, you captured the movement of waves and rocks on a boat, playing with the rhythm, the up and down movements of water. A series that could be compared as the exact opposite of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes long exposures.
I was out on that boat in a storm in November, in many times, and I wanted to capture one sharp moment in every image. I had a clear idea of the focus I wanted for each picture, and I believe you can almost get seasick, while looking at them. Comparing the series with Sugimoto’s is very interesting, but I never thought about it when I was doing it. I was surely and fully occupied with the subject, the sea, the boat I stood on.
Mette Tronvoll – Time
January 30th – May 25th, 2025
Kunstsilo
Sjølystveien 8
4610 Kristiansand
https://www.kunstsilo.no
