For her exhibition at Hordaland Kunstsenter, artist Sara Larsen Stiansen creates an immersive video installation that takes us into a study of sensation and the abstraction of morphing bodies. In the gallery space, Stiansen plays with recognizable shapes and spaces through scale and repetition, evoking haptic associations.
With two new works, Soft palate and Styles of pass, Stiansen draws on sensorial communication, environmental connections and encounters with people, matter, and places. In Soft palate we see firm yet flexible tissues in continuous loop, namely Adam’s apples, exposing the process of swallowing. Styles of pass captures moments of unveiling, a succession of waving capes showing hairdressers final touch in motion, one after the other.
Playing with sensation through analogue cameras, Stiansen explores the morphological effect of working with materials that have organic and fluctuating qualities. In Slit, the primary feature of existence is not static substance or being, but process or becoming.
A slit is understood as a cut, or opening into something, making visible the being between one thing and another. In the video installation shown at the art centre, bodies – human and not human – are reconfigured through the gestures of cutting, unveiling, and swallowing—performative acts shared with the shutter movements of the Super 8 camera.
Sara Larsen Stiansen is currently studying Fine Arts (MFA) at Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. She has studied Fine Art at Konstfack University, Stockholm and Angewandte University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Her works crosses a variety of media including film, photography, sound and sculpture, in both digital and analogue realms. She is interested in ways we apprehend visible and invisible natures, how they are felt, and perhaps how they reverberate. Working primarily with moving images, she converts everyday observations into new constellations, where fragments are brought together, adjusted and extracted into new offsprings.
The MA Week is a collaboration between Hordaland Kunstsenter and the Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, UiB. Through an open call, MFA students are invited to submit proposals for an exhibition to be realised at Hordaland Kunstsenter. Guest jury-member this year was artist and KMD alumni Emilie Wright.
