Military Landscapes / Militære Landskap

Condition: Fine

Military Landscapes was produced in connection with Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén’s Festival Exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall in 2008. The exhibition catalogue reproduces the whole photo series, which was produced specifically for the occasion, and it reflects the works’ strikingly beautiful and objective exploration of general questions about society and the future. For the Festival Exhibition in 2008 Book and Hedén took their point of departure in the idea of the typical Norwegian outdoor landscape where military expansions and interventions disturb our habitual ideas of virgin nature.

The exhibition catalogue begins with a preface by the curator of the Festival Exhibition, Solveig Øvstebø. The Norwegian landscape – and the point of the military landscape – are discussed in detail in the extensive textual contributions from the Swedish professor of environmental history Sverker Sørlin and the visual artist Halvor Haugen. The geographer and social observer Rachel Woodward discusses in her text how military power both forms and is formed by places, landscapes and surroundings. In Book and Hedén’s works we find references to models in the history of art, sometimes clear, at other times as an understated backdrop. In this context Ekaterina Degot’s art-historical essay entitled Searching for the remains of the modern opens up paths for interesting new readings of Book and Hedén’s fascinating presentation of military landscapes. At a time when warfare is often discussed in terms of non-material entities such as the struggle for public opinion, media strategies, satellite images or data sabotage, the physical traces in the landscape remind us of the materiality of war.