Justice's Interior Designer, 2022
3 channel video installation collaging Supreme Court sentences, queue numbers, color hair catalogues, assembly instructions, kennings, and wallpaper patterns; total running time 45 minutes aprox. Paper clips, rubber bands, and porcelain.
“Justice’s Interior Designer” is a video and porcelain installation. The elements of the piece are arranged depending on architecture and media availability. The work collages 37 short stories inspired in translated decisions of the Supreme Court of Norway with queue numbers, assembly instructions, color hair catalogues, skaldic poetry, and decorative patterns.
The work wanders about ideas of justice, transparency, identity, and authority, and the representation of these matters through language and structure. Process To create this work I departed from the structural, aesthetical, and subconscious implications present in a police display of drugs or weapons after a raid. There, the illusion of the evidence shown implies that transparency is a simulation that the authority practices to engage with our desire to understand. To build the dramatization, theatricality and context, artist used kennings. Kennings are a compound expression in Old Norse poetry with metaphorical meaning. For example: instead of tongue, we can say sword of the mouth; or instead of murder, we can say to fill the mouth of the wolf. In “Justice’s Interior Designer” the kennings draw a veil over the real. As an opposition to the law, which we believe to be transparent, the real is hidden. The meaning becomes cryptic, as something hermetic that makes sense only through a process of education and recognition.
Concept The work reflects on the biopolitical construction of subjectivity through the legal system. Artist intention is to question the acceptance that law and order determine and define normality. Being normal, is accepting our bodies constructed by a normativity that tends to visibilize the conduct of a body inside capitalist structures of success. In the installation, the porcelains mirror the video, acting as fallen replicas, objects of desire. Porcelains represent the outcasts, but remain as protagonists of these stories.
Facts “Justice’s Interior Designer” was shown during the Kuvan Kevät 2022 in the Academy of Fine arts Helsinki. The total running duration of the piece is approximately 45 minutes. It was installed using 2 screens for each of the personas activating the stories, while the subtitles were projected on a bisque porcelain surface held together with paperclips. Around 1800 high temperature porcelains were made for the installation and were piled together following the design of the stairs. Finally, the art work is surrounded by the institution, falling under the permanent surveillance of the architecture. “Justice’s Interior Designer” mimics the atmosphere of the Academy of Fine Arts, as a miniature universe contained in a Fabergé egg.
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