Embracing its setting in the long-disused waiting room of a railway station, ‘Nordic Noir’ seeks to explore themes of dystopian familiarity; when horror and the uncanny emerge from what is known, and most intimate to us. Artists Fabienne Audéoud, Emanuele Marcuccio and Marc Asekhame, Erkki Pirtola, Hanna Rochereau, Kaare Ruud, and Matilde Westavik Gaustad each explore how the mundane and the unusual might intersect and intertwine through their distinct and collaborative artistic practices.
Through the artworks presented here, the exhibition asks a series of questions around forms of the habitual; what shadows, or echoes, linger behind the quotidian, and the domestic. Drawing from German theorist Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on city life in the 19th century, the exhibition poses the interior spaces of buildings as encapsulating their own detective story. For Benjamin, there was always a body hidden somewhere, and in the crime stories that inspired this reading, the murderers are always the bourgeoisie. ‘Nordic Noir’ seeks to provide a re-reading of these notions, rooting the exploration of its themes in the contexts of contemporary art, and contemporary life, today. Though in this exhibition, there are no corpses on view, the artworks carry their own buried bodies, so to speak. Together, the works bring to the fore a sense of the familiar and safe that may suggest security, but which, on closer viewing, reveal a more complex, distant and horrifying nature through their symbolic and material character.
