Resonance
by Astrid la Cour, 2022
The dream of cohesion with the world; with other people, with places, with something greater than oneself, is a basic longing in humankind. A longing that can drive one through life. To discover new contexts and meetings, or draw one back to seek out places, signs, or events where this cohesion was previously experienced.
Resonance is oscillations. Sociologist Hartmut Rosa uses the term to describe fluxes between the individual and the world – when something speaks to us and touches us, the feeling arises that everything for a moment is connected, falls into place. It is not necessarily possible to see concrete contexts or understand this feeling of resonance, but when it is experienced, one is in no doubt. When it arises, one feels for a moment connected and in a vibrating dialogue with the world. Resonance connects the individual with the world and at the same time holds a force for change. Resonance is not harmony, it is about developing and finding one’s own voice and being heard as well as hearing and being moved by the voices of the world. It is this understanding of, and search for, connections between the individual and the world that one senses in Astrid Kruse Jensen’s work. She works with resonance as an echo of what once was – a resonance with the traces of the past in the present. There is an awareness of what is lost forever, and at the same time she is driven by a longing to let the traces of memory be a part of the present. An echo that lives and connects then and now.
But resonance is uncontrollable. It is an illusion to think that the right framework can (re)create a connection to the past. That one can create a situation or physical framework that can evoke the feeling that everything comes together. What one seeks – in dreams as well as in sorrow. But regardless of our awareness of the illusory in the attempt, the longing does not disappear, but lives on in her circle of fragments of places and emotions which are evoked. The very act of searching becomes the real state of being as well as a way of holding on to the intangible. But dream and reality never unite, and the abstract remains eternally abstract.
For Astrid Kruse Jensen, memory has been an ongoing driving force in her artistic work. Later, the unbearable weight of grief has been woven in, and memories and dreams have formed the starting point for new works through the grief process.
The essence of photography is to capture a moment, but Astrid Kruse Jensen uses it to recall elements of a bygone era and works with time as an abstract and non-linear concept. Time stands still in the empty spaces – and at the same time they open up to a timeless state. Her works vibrate in this indefinable field between memory, traces, and glimpses of reverberation in the world.
As is often the case with Astrid Kruse Jensen, the works move between the specifically photographic and at the same time painterly expression. Through double exposures, chemical traces, long shutter speeds and the use of backlighting, the photographic image’s concrete image is dissolved. Long shutter speeds in the camera allow the light, like brushstrokes of light, to leave traces and repetitions in the subject. With the camera, Astrid Kruse Jensen captures more than what the human eye can perceive. When the camera is moved with an open lens, movement is captured and in this way the photograph captures a moment in motion that can only be created through the photographic gaze.
Another element that has been prevalent in Astrid Kruse Jensen’s work is the houses, which play an important role as both a physical and imaginary framework for humankind and its dreams. A motif that contains the duality of a place, where you are taken care of, but which also contains turbulence and shattered dreams. In her depictions of space, the physical framework is blurred, with traces of several motifs in one. Instead, images of a mental state, images of both the unreality of reality and staggered memories arise. Motif and figure dissolve and merge, and dreams, longings and the intangible universe of grief emerge. The empty spaces are reduced to a backdrop for memories, hopes and realizations and make it clear that it is precisely the sense of resonance we seek more than a specific place. And as such, Astrid Kruse Jensen’s works become poetic shifts of reality, images of the flickering longing.
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Astrid Kruse Jensen (b. 1975) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in the Netherlands and the Glasgow School of Art, U.K. She has been awarded and received nominations for several prizes, notably the Deutsche Börse Preis in 2014, or Anne Marie Telmányi’s prize for women artists in 2017. Kruse Jensen has had solo exhibitions in Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Iceland and India, as well as several group exhibitions in Europe, The United States, Canada and China. Artworks are part of several private and public collections, including Moderna Museet Stockholm, the George Eastman House, ARoS, The National Collection of Photography, Manchester City Gallery, Vestsjæl-lands Kunstmuseum, Artotheque de Caen, the John Kobal Foundation, the Danish Arts Foundation.
Kruse Jensen’s most recent museum exhibition, Traces of Resonance, is on view until 17 December 2023 at Odsherred Kunstmuseum, Denmark.
Louisiana Museum’s Channel features an insightful video and interview conducted by Marc-Christoph Wagner during the spring of 2023, in the artist’s studio on Refshaleøen in Copenhagen and Malergården, Museum Vestsjælland, Denmark. Please visit Louisiana Channel to watch ‘Astrid Kruse Jensen: Trying To Understand What Has Happened’. (Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023)
