Lightnin’ Howlin’ and Screamin’: Stasis

Stasis is the first publication by artist duo Jessika Thörnqvist and Kim Ramberghaug and is made up of a selection of images from the period between 2011 and 2015. It contains paradoxical moments of change and transition when the world and its things are not given, but appear more ambiguously - in their making or dissolution. Capturing moments when light not only illuminates, but itself becomes presence - as reflection, mist, shimmer, haze, shadow and spectra - this literal photography documents a collection of deflected gazes. Instead of being presented as facts to be accepted, these images could rather be characterized as traces of looking away – looking away at the coloured shadow on the wall, or keeping the head turned to the angle at which the sunspot stays in view.
Performed as negation of habitual patterns of attention and perception, these exercises are done with succinct gestural eloquence so that the most transient perceptual objects are approached in a noncoercive relation. The photos in Stasis convey whole experiences of emphemeral phenomenality where reality is suspended, and replaced by something more immediate and sensuous. As Rei Terada (2009) has described, enforcement of the right to look away coincides with a deeply ethical position. The absence of grammar for some feelings reflects a prevailing, and deeply internalized, unfreedom, the alleviation of which only happen on the edge of the aesthetic.

edition of 300 copies

2016