About the project:
The three parts of the
project; 'One for every wish', 'Amor Omnia Vincit' and
'To be undone',
were finished one after the other between 2006-2010.
The images and drawings, for each part around 23 pieces, have been exhibited
both seperately and together during the last years, there is also a
catalog available
for each part, printed with the great support and help of Pierogi Gallery,
New York
and Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam.
Below are a few texts about the project.
Part one 'One
for every wish' :
I had found a small wooden ship
that looked almost
exactly like the schooner Lefteria on which my uncle sailed in 1972
between
England and Spain. Lefteria got hit by French weather ship in the
middle of the
night and my uncle, who was asleep, sank with it.
I made the image “For Magnus and Lefteria” in Leipzig
in May 2007
as a way of figuring out how accidental choices and decisive moments
such as this
one can change the way we experience and understand life and how traces
of them
linger on through generations. I started searching in my own background
as well as
in literature, daydreams, desires and wishes for the starting point
of stories, for those
moments that in hindsight stand out so clear in memory that one has
the possibility
to access them at all times. Through photography and writing I explored
and
confronted those stories close to me- real or imagined. By creating
images from
feelings, gestures and objects the process became a way of relating
to and internalizing
the world, somehow like a tool to fill the holes and at least an attempt
at making the
narrative somewhat complete.
After reading P.O Enquist’s ‘The Book About Blanche and
Marie’ I decided to divide
my project into three parts inspired by the three ‘question
books’ written by the main
character Blanche. The question books of Blanche, one yellow, one
black and one red
are said to start each page with a question and it is through her
sometimes erratic
answers that a story gradually unfolds. In the first part, ‘One
for every wish’ I have
been occupied with the question I as a child applied in every situation,
why?
The curiosity and playfulness of this question drove my search forward
through
continuous reading, questioning and image making. Like Blanche’s
incomplete answers
that leave room for interpretation and still manage to convey a story
I felt that my
images held the story I was looking for. It underlies them all, I
guess it is not always
necessary to know exactly where the stories originate from, everyone
has their own and
they are never that different, a shipwreck, lost love, accidents,
failed dreams and a lot of hope…
Part two 'Amor
omnia vincit':
Text by Raymond MacDonald
Professor of Music Psychology
and Improvisation at Glasgow
Caledonian University, Scotland
The study of personality presents many beautiful ambiguities as it opens
up a limitless
landscape of interpretative possibilities. For example, are there a
finite number of stable
enduring monolithic building blocks of personality in the neurological
connections of our
brain, identified as traits and constituted by our genetic inheritance,
that predict our behaviour
regardless of situation? Or are we individually so unique, so phenomenologically
idiosyncratic,
that to understand personality we have to explore subjective experiences?
If so, are all
attempts at population generalisation through psychometric gymnastics
essentially futile?
Maybe it makes no sense to think of personality residing within the
mind at all but rather
personality is constructed in the language that we use on a day-to-day
basis. Alternatively,
is the driving force of personality the universal unconscious urges
and motivations of existence
that if realised unambiguously lead to the annihilation of the human
race? These are just four
well evidenced, highly respected and sometimes controversial approaches
to personality and
they produce infinite options when searching for explanations of behaviour.
While ambiguity has
a controversial place within modern psychological theory, not least
because one important goal
of work in this area is to produce solutions, alleviate suffering and
ameliorate pain and distress,
ambiguity is celebrated within aesthetic epistemologies and here beauty
is also constructed along
an infinite number of ambiguous dimensions.
Bournonville, like a psychologist, presents constructions of personality.
Not complete
comprehensive structures, but rather she opens multiple seams, narrow
and endlessly deep;
multiple seams of fundamental personality dilemmas. These dilemmas are
interrogated and
problematised in such away that we are invited to explore our feelings
in response to these elemental
questions. Whether these feelings are conscious or not there is no escape
from the Faustian
Gretchenfrage provoked by the images. An obscured face looking upwards
towards a symbolically
and complexly textured background. Curtains opening and possibly beckoning
us to trust our
uncertain feelings of attraction and begin a journey, a drama, where
passion, trust and hope have
significant roles to play.
While some of her previous work has dealt with constructions of death
and the death instinct, Thanatos,
the ticking clock inside Captain Hook’s nemesis, the crocodile,
the current exhibition tackles the
ambiguities of love. Love; not so much a psychological minefield when
trying to negotiate its philosophical
intricacies, but rather a saccerine quicksand where even the most unromantic
of theorists can dissolve
into mawkish syrup. However, the pitfalls of sentimentality are avoided
and Bournonville tackles
both the light and the dark side of love with almost Jungian equanimity.
Jung claimed that good
and evil “are a logically equivalent pair of opposites”
and co-existent halves of any loving relationship.
“They do not derive from each other but are always there together.
Evil is a human value, like good.”
There are of course many barriers to intimacy: the need to ensure that
vulnerabilities are not exposed;
personal space preserved and not threatened, these barriers may also
be implied in the use of key objects
within the images. Roland Barthes maintained an intense fascination
with the psychological significance
of everyday items throughout his career. It was this passion, trying
to unravel the multiple ambiguities
relating to the significance of objects, which helped him delineate
crucial tenants of semiotic theory.
The psychological significance of everyday objects plays an essential
role in Bournonville’s work; curtains,
stairs, pictureframes, chairs, tables, doors all hint at, or even invite
the viewer to take part in, psychological
journeys that explore the ambiguities of loving.
These ambiguities of loving begin at birth in the cooing and babbling
that takes place between a parent
and a baby. Indeed there is considerable evidence that these interactions
are musical. Every human being
has a biological guarantee of musicianship. Not a vague utopian ideal
but the conclusion drawn by scientists
researching foundations of human behaviour. Before we communicate using
language, music plays a
fundamental role in the earliest and most important loving relationship
of our lives; that with our parents.
We can indeed sing before we can talk. Moreover, not only are these
interactions musical but they are
improvisatory and ambiguous. Improvisatory in the sense that improvisation
is defined as the spontaneous
unfolding of communication. Therefore we are not only all musical but
we are all sophisticated and
consummate improvisers. Life’s ambiguous journey for us all is
one long improvisation.
Journeys, improvisatory, existential and literal, are recurrent themes
in Bournonville’s work. There is also
a strong narrative element to the images: stories of exploration and
uncertainty. Bournonville doesn’t so
much tell her stories as allude to themes and central concerns. However,
it is clear these observations have
existential significance for us all. Everyone carries their own stories
and these are inextricably linked to the
cultural milieu in which the authors journey. Kierkegaard’s personal
preoccupation with himself was, he believed,
transfigured by divine governance into universal significance and he
viewed himself as a "singular universal".
Divine governance or not, the father of existentialism did signal that
no matter how personal and intimate our
psychological journeys, there are commonalities in the ambiguities of
love that resonate universally.
Part three 'To
be undone'
Text by Eamon O'Kane
Taking
its cue from the human eye, the camera is equally imprecise in its reproduction
of the real.
We see imperfectly and this sense of loss is compounded by
our fallible memory, which in turn feeds
our yearning to retrieve the
real. Humankind’s obsession with nostalgia is fuelled by this sense
of loss.
Over time our memories disappear and dissolve imperceptibly into
themselves, just as our bodies
slowly decay and disintegrate. We are haunted
by traces and fragments, merged experiences and feelings
overlap and intertwine
through the passing of time.
Human sight is inexorably linked to language, which is also fallible when
describing the real. Descriptions
either tend to the poetic, historical
or mathematical when describing an event in history or performance on
stage.
There is a discursive aspect to looking, where we process what
we are looking at in relation to ourselves.
It is in the interplay between
linguistic development and experience of the real that a child is enabled
to make
sense of what s/he is seeing in relation to a developing notion
of selfhood. It is perhaps for this reason that in
early childhood the
questions ‘what’s that?’ and later ‘why?’
are so important, they are the tools that allow the
child access to language
and knowledge and a deeper understanding of the world around them and
where they
are situated in it. Nadja Bournonville’s works thrive on curiosity
both in terms of the way they are made and
how the viewer interacts with them. In many of her photographs the figure’s
gaze is obstructed by a hand,
by mist on glass or by cloth. The obscured vision of the participants
echoes the fact that the puzzle of her
constructions will never be fully deciphered. This relates to the way
the photographs are made, they are performative
and inherently referential to the process of their making, and yet they
resist easy interpretation. Like reading a
blotched and smudged postcard they only give us half the story, which
generates more questions than answers.
Bournonville sets the stage with ambiguous juxtapositions and scenarios
where the viewers feel compelled
to re-inhabit their childhood selves.
The journeys that the photographs, and their titles, take us on are psycho-linguistic.
They probe the boundaries of the real whilst at the same time presenting
something which is inherently unreal, often
concerned about the language
of things and how the human body interacts with objects and spaces. They
sometimes
have landscape as their subject but always touch on the landscape
of the mind. The spaces that the artist chooses to
photograph reinforce
this aspect: they are spaces marked by existence; they are places in which
the documented past is
present in a layering of scratches and stains,
of flaking paint and worn wooden boards. The actual process of composing
the elements in the photograph is recorded within the image too, if you
could scrutinize the marks on the floor and the
fingerprints on the objects.
However all that remains are the ghosts of occurrences and traces of what
has been left behind.
Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida ‘ The camera obscura, in
short, has generated at one and the same time
perspective painting, photography,
and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography
seems to me
closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary
(and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death.’
There is a quiet reverence about Nadja Bournonville’s photography,
an attention to composition, to every detail, which is
not dissimilar
to the Victorian photographers composure when setting up a photograph
of the recently deceased. Yet the
death in Bournonville’s photographs
is not a human death; it is the passing of a moment, the first and last
glimpse of
something that will never be the same again. The stage is set,
what has come before and what will come after is anyone’s guess…
Eamon O’Kane, Odense, Denmark, May 2010
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